The Nature article linked below indicates an apparently growing trend towards downplaying the role of journal impact factor for evaluating the individual articles published in a journal.
Do you expect this trend to actually lead to the modification of the research evaluation system at your university/research institute and/or your country?
What should be the right way to evaluate the quality of research output?
http://www.nature.com/news/beat-it-impact-factor-publishing-elite-turns-against-controversial-metric-1.20224
http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/07/05/062109
This is an hot topic in Italy because in the last years Italian Ministry for University and Research (MIUR) has bound the distribution of funding to universities also to research results, which is periodically evaluated by an agency (ANVUR). Fo some scientific fields the agency has established impact indicators such as number of publications in indexed journals, number of citations and h-index. This approach also affected academic career because according to the in force national rule, to get scientific qualification for associate and full professor position, the candidates must meet impact indicators teshold established by ANVUR. So, at least in Italy, impact factor and other metrics are relevant for research and individual evaluations.
I am not sure whether we are witness of a true change of current evaluation systems. The problem is that research is massively funded by the industry and business associates are eager to narrow all things down to just a few numbers that help them to evaluate the success rate. So it is not so much a problem of the scientific communities evluating themselves by impact factors, but of their funders evaluating them by such numbers.
Daniel, many thanks for your response. While the basic research is IMHO mostly funded by government rather than industry, the demand for a simple indicator of quality of the individual research output appears to be universal. I guess this is one of the main reasons behind the popularity of h-index.
This is an hot topic in Italy because in the last years Italian Ministry for University and Research (MIUR) has bound the distribution of funding to universities also to research results, which is periodically evaluated by an agency (ANVUR). Fo some scientific fields the agency has established impact indicators such as number of publications in indexed journals, number of citations and h-index. This approach also affected academic career because according to the in force national rule, to get scientific qualification for associate and full professor position, the candidates must meet impact indicators teshold established by ANVUR. So, at least in Italy, impact factor and other metrics are relevant for research and individual evaluations.
@Luigi: Well, I hope this never happens in Germany. Establishing impact thresholds for decisions over funding or academic careers will lead, in my opionion, most likely to a drastic decrease in the diversity of research topics and research approaches and must not necessarily improve the quality of academic output.
@Luigi: Thanks for the info. By any chance, would you have any links describing the Italian system you told about?
Unfortunately possible links and documents are in Italian, for example this the link to ANVUR web page: http://www.anvur.org/index.php?lang=it
This is the link to the Italian Scientific Qualification (ASN) web page (where you can find a few information in english too): http://abilitazione.miur.it/public/index.php?lang=ita
Finally, there is a blog (ROARS) where you can learn how our evaluation system is an hot topic in Italy (some news/articles are in English): http://www.roars.it/online/
Well let me tell you one thing if a journal is going to accept each and every paper it gets and publishes it, then it can be tough thing for them as when any survey is done and found out that the journal previously used to accept only those manuscripts that had a lot of hard work shown than the work now which had hard work but it was not up to the mark. So then it will loose it's impact factor value. So, in the near future the impact factor of journals can either be downplaying or even it can go up for other journals which previously used to accept all the manuscripts but now sees the hard work of the author which was previously less seen in the previous issues. So, i would like to say that impact factor can either increase or decrease.
An interesting question.
In order to reduce the Impact Factor's coefficient of citation, one central centralized system of citation indexation in the global dimension should be created that works in an automated manner based on the application of artificial intelligence and possibly also the analysis of large information collections in Big Data database systems.
I invite you to the discussion
Publication Metrics: http://naepub.com/publishing/publication-metrics/
In Korea, JIF is the most influential decision-making indicator; however, I feel that the trend is slowly changing, e.g. from JIF to a citation number of each paper. In the near future, I guess that g-index and eigenfacor score might work as an alternative to JIF (see the link above).
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