So much that it’s almost the only directory that is taken into account to evaluate the quality excellence of research or publications, except for a few fields of knowledge such as engineering, as far as I know.
http://gaudeamusacademia.com/forum/topics/why-journal-citation-reports-has-so-much-influence-and-power-when?xg_source=activity
If it was the only annoying thing in publishing industry, yes I would agree. But I think it is just the head of the iceberg. The big issue is the paid publishing process: It increases the inequality among researchers especially when the 'fees' are large enough.
True, and I agree - very irritating. However the monster has not entirely been of Thomson's own making - it is the academic/research community that identified the IF as an easy way of determining quality, and have latched onto it with such vigor. There are other metrics around: Scopus - some of which data is available via SciMago - and Google Scholar as mentioned above, plus Altmetrics (using social media comments as well as citations) - but until the academic/research community start to use these instead of the IF, then we are stuck with it. (And I, for one, really wish we weren't!). Oh - and another problem, all of these different indexes contain different sub-sets of journals so any "impact" they report is based on different data, and so gives different values to the same journal. Confusing. Irritating. But that's life ...
I cannot understand why such a passion at every question about journals, citation systems & norms and all relevant things. Relax ladies & gentlemen, relax...
Is there another/concurrent solution for selecting top journals among many variuos journals? Of course it shouldn't be overestimated.
Dear Emilia, in what solutions are you thinking of? Thanks.
Thomson Reuters / ISI take into account the theory that the most revolutionary research will always be published in the very few leading journals (Garfield's law), ie. only round 100 out of a few thousand journals in a particular subject will contain research that's truly significant. Other journals carry work that's of little or no impact at all. In HK, academics get scolded for wasting their time publishing in journals that aren't selected for coverage in he JCR. This is how bad it is but the system is designed to retain only members of staff who can ensure their universities are ranked in the world's top 50-100.
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