Why should the impact factor of a scientific journal be considered irrelevant?
Luis - the impact factor is not irrelevant. I agree that traditionally 'pure' academic citation metrics dictated how we were 'measured' in terms of research impact and that is largely still the same - but that landscape is rapidly changing. It is becoming increasingly common, especially for job interviews, to be able to identify how your work impacts practice and how industry notices/receives your research. The main academic 'currency, at the moment, tends to revolve around citation and impact factors.
Hi,
The impact factor is basically a measure of journal influence, so it is an overall measure that takes into account those papers in a journal that were cited. This measure helps rank journals by the number of citations received, and indicates attention and influence of a journal, but most of all, it indicates a final form of journal usage.
IF refers to how many readers are interested in the scope of the journal, so they cite results published in that journal.
that is why, IF is actually a weight of the journal.
In my opinion, the IF is something totally immaterial, which sometimes does not reflect the quality of the research done by a researcher. I can publish in a high impact journal, but if this work is subsequently cited little, then the relevance of my publication is irrelevant. The purpose of the IF is to measure something, respect rather to quantity, not quality, even though I recognize that this is not always true. There are other factors to measure the quality of your research that are not related to the IF.
Is not Irrelevante but IF is not the sole factor to take into account for selecting a journal for your publication. Nowadays other factor are more preciated than this one.
Recently, a new parameter has been proposed, the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), with rapid acceptance and use, which uses citations from the Scopus database (Elsevier) for its calculation. The SJR corrects many of the criticisms that the IF has received since it includes more journals, covers a longer period for counting appointments (3 years), limits self-citations and, as a main characteristic, ponders citations according to the importance of the where they come from using an algorithm similar to Google PageRank®.
Hi Louis, interesting discussion you have started, as I understand it’s not about ranking of journals, but which metric is the best assessment of a specific journals “true” impact - and I agree that SJR is interesting. The SJR webpage will also give you the IF, and is my favourite for information of journal metrics
https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php
Bw
Olav
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