Is IF a real descriptor to evaluate the quality of a journal or is it a mean to attract people living in fools paradise?
Mohsin - it depends on your interpretation of a fools paradise. For some fools, the illusionary paradise is king and 'this is their world when they are told that it is' i.e. ignorance is bliss.
IF, as with many academic systems, is an attempt to maintain some sort of perspective. No system is perfect - and we look to the next. IF has been established for some time now - and is the current default.
> Is IF a real descriptor to evaluate the quality of a journal
No. I would say that there's a slight correlation between IF and quality of journal, but similar to p-values: these are no measure for evidence of an effect, but sometimes it is more likely to have found a relevant effect when the p-value is smaller than a certain treshold.
Despite of this, it's often easier - for whoever needs it - to judge your scientific output by IF.
Mohsin - it depends on your interpretation of a fools paradise. For some fools, the illusionary paradise is king and 'this is their world when they are told that it is' i.e. ignorance is bliss.
IF, as with many academic systems, is an attempt to maintain some sort of perspective. No system is perfect - and we look to the next. IF has been established for some time now - and is the current default.
Dean Whitehead
I just love this " Ignorance is bliss". Can't we think beyond the current default?
it is important in pakistan, since IF determines the productivity of a researcher by HEC
Mushtaq Ahmad
IF determines the productivity of a researcher by HEC. Is it so?
Yes, it is the case that a factor in academic promotions is the IF values for the journals faculty publish in. As to the quality-IF relationship, I think it is a metric developed so that publishers can entice researchers to publish their work in journals under particular publisher umbrellas. I believe that the quality of any journal is more closely tied to the rigor and quality of the journal's peer review process.
The concept of Impact Factor (IF) was designed originally as a means to help authors to choose the best journals for publishing their articles. It is not proper to evaluate the influence of individual research articles or the status of researchers by simply looking at the IF of journals in which their articles have been published.
A major drawback is that only journals indexed in Clarivate Analytics’ (formerly, Thomson Reuters) source database, Web of Science, is used for the calculation of the IF. Naturally, several journals, especially those not published in English, are left out. Another problem with IF is that it is discipline dependent. Therefore, IF must be used to compare journals within a discipline only, and not across disciplines, as citation patterns can vary extensively across disciplines.
Presently, we have another competing index, CiteScore, being promoted as a simple way of measuring the citation impact of journal titles. They claim that: “Comprehensive, transparent, current and free, CiteScore metrics help you to analyze the impact of all serial titles – including journals – in Scopus”. Scopus is owned by Elsevier.
Certainly Impact factor alone is not the sole criteria to evaluate the quality of a journal or an article. IF was initially made to ease librarians to select journals for library purposes. However, later its been almost only evaluation stuff for journal reputation. Personally I believe IF is an important thing.
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