The Impact Factor indicators for scientific journals for 2020 have just been published. More journals boast and celebrate that their IF has increased by a few, a dozen or even several dozen percent. I am intentionally not mentioning what kind of magazines they are. Why?
Because the IF grows for everyone. Every year. what does it mean? Isn't that a bit like a credited science bubble? Every year there are more articles, the global number of citations and therefore the IF is growing. Will there be new indicators? For example, the annual growth rate IF : )? If everyone grows, this is how the impact indicator should now be measured.
What are your views on IF inflation?
See also this discussion which started in parallel to yours: https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_could_be_a_next_scientific_quality_evaluation_approach
Your boss will rather unlikely look at the journals' IF, but instead look at a few years back of citations from your papers, to see whether you are actively producing, and if you get feedback in the form of good citation scores a few years later. That seems to be legit.
I have published in one journal with IF 60 or higher. The score has since then dropped a lot. The journal is still as good. One clear verdict is to not pay a lot of attention to the score - as it fluctuates a lot. Write good papers that in some way make something better - that's all you need to do.
Hello! We do similar discussion here: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Unprecedented_growth_of_impact_factor
and found out that this year is specific largely because Clarivate has changed the method of calculating the IF...
IF is not a good metric to evaluate journal quality. Some editors are asking the authors to cite papers published in their journal in the last 5 years, to boost their journal's impact factor. This happened to me twice, from two different journals, with impact factors of 5 and 7, and well-known, respected journals, too. Also, a lot of reviewers are asking the authors to cite their papers, and this happened to me many times, at least a dozen times to be exact. In light of such practices, IF is nothing but a number. Also, when I look at some journals with very high impact factors, I see a lot of low quality articles published there as well, further indication that IF is meaningless.
If you are worried about "inflation" and the meaning of the IF number, you can always use the percentiles per subject category of the IF. Those are always relative as they compare a journal's IF with other journals in the subject area. They also range between 0 and 1.
You are right, of course, that such an indicator has an absolute value. However, this does not solve the problem of IF inflation. Let's look at the average number of references from the 1990s and now. eg from the Journal of Catalysis, the number of refernces (average) was 20-25 now it is around 60-70! The thesis should be made that 20-30 years ago, assigning a given reference was much more cautious for the author. Today, access to literature is much easier, you can build a large database of references.
Perhaps IF can be adjusted for inflation, just like the prices and price indices are adjusted in economics. For each specific field, we can come up with a representative "basket" of journals, and calculate an index based on their respective weights. Weights in the basket can be based on the percentiles of the journals in the area (using reliable metrics), and they can be adjusted from year to year. Say, the IF index for 1990 is 20, and the IF index for 2021 is 50. Journal A had an IF of 8.0 in 2021, which corresponds to 8(20)/50 = 3.2 in 1990. This means journal A has a nominal IF of 8.0 today, but its real IF based on 1990 IFs is 3.2. If its actual IF in 1990 was 2.8 in 1990, then its IF improved in real IF values by about 0.4, which corresponds to a 14.3% real improvement over 31 years.
Corrections to some statements
1°) The impact factor concerns journals and not researchers.
2°) It is wrong to say that the impact factor only increases.
Definition:
The journal impact factor (JIF) measures the number of times an average article, published in the previous two years in a particular science journal, was cited in a given year.
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For example, the impact factor IF of a journal X is for the year 2022 is the number of citations of articles published by this journal during the years 2020 and 2021 divided by the number of articles published during this period, it is therefore the number average of citations per article:
It can theoretically decrease (it is not because there are more 'articles that the IF will increase)
________________________________________
example 1:
IF(journal X,2022)= (number of citations 2020,2021/number of
articles 2020,2021)= 1200 citations/800 articles =1.50
______________________________________
For 2021, we can have:
example 2:
IF(journal X,2021)= (number of citations 2019,2020/number of
articles 2019,2020)= 1100 citations/700 articles =1.57
______________________________________
conclusion for the journal X:
IF(2022)=1.50
If(2021)=1.57
IF(2022) < IF(2021)
I think the journal citations index fluctuates if it does not receive sufficient citations. That is hardly possible in my field.
Robert E. Przekop you are fully right, this is one of the contributing factor: the more references we include in a single paper, the higher IF of journals in general.
I don't know why there's so much fuss on impact factors to begin with. As a researcher, your only concern is that your work is ultimately read and purposefully used by others. As long as you publish in journals that are relatable to your field, then you're good to go.
There are several reasons but particularly in 2020 lots of researches done on COVID-19 and most of journals particularly biomedical fields escalated.
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