Reflection on theme 1 - What I’ve learnt

I find it hard to really reflect on what I’ve learned this week. Not because I haven’t learnt anything, but because there haven’t been even a day since the seminar. You don’t instantly learn new things; it takes a while for it to sink in and be of use. Or that’s atleast how it is for me. More often than not, I’ve had epiphanies for the courses I’ve taken weeks after they have had finished. But, since I have to do a reflection, I’ll give it my best shot.

Even before this course began, I’ve come in contact with the term impact-factor before. I stumbled upon it when I was doing my bachelors degree, but then it really wasn’t important what impact factor the journals I used had; the important thing was that they were peer-reviewed. So in that sense I haven't really learned anything new about journals, just reinforced what I already knew. But I am kind of sceptical of them, since a high impact factor really doesn’t say if the articles in the journal is good or not, only that they have been cited a lot. I don’t think this is a good measurement of quality, but on the other hand, I don’t really have a better way of quantize a journal/paper as of right now. It’s something I have to think about and then I’ll maybe come up with something good.

The other part of this weeks theme was philosophical science. I found it really interesting, but way too hard to understand in such short amount of time. I have a really limited knowledge in the field of philosophy; the only I’ve read was a course in high school (gymnasium in swedish), but that was only snippets from many philosophers throughout the history. Anyway, I have a really hard time right now seeing if I have learnt anything at all regarding my way of seeing science. The seminar was more or less fruitless for me; I didn’t get a better understanding of the book, or maybe it is that way as of right now. Maybe I’ll get it some weeks from now, who knows! Really though, I think it would have been better if we got some kind of basic introduction to philosophy instead of just jumping straight into it.