Created in 1972, when data digitization was non-existent, to help librarians choose the most relevant journals for users of scientific collections, impact factor became a competency factor in the 1990s. allowing to evaluate authors quality. Thus, in some countries, researchers are given premiums proportional to the impact factors of the journals in which they publish.
However, recently, some American journals have eliminated any reference to impact factor in their websites. In addition, The "Science" journal cited in its opening pages an article written by eight leading scholarly publishers with the title "Hate journal impact factors? New study gives you one more reason". The "Nature" journal has gone further: with this title: "Beat it, impact factor!".
Does the impact factor realy provide good information on researchers quality work of ?
According to Lariviere et al. (2016), "This measure creates more confusion about the quality of scientific research than it illuminates, it should be abandoned completely". These authors wish that scientific community understand the limits of impact factor in research evaluation and they add that "the impact factor is highly influenced by a small number of widely cited articles". Thus, of the hundreds of articles published annually by the journals Nature (IF equal to 38.1) and Science (IF equal to 34.7), only about forty articles correspond to these averages. Larivière et al. (2016) calculated that citations from three-quarters of articles in 11 major journals in recent years are below the impact factor value. In other words, less than one in four items gets at least the average value. However, "The average is a relevant index when the data vary little and follow a normal distribution .... In the case of scientific articles, the majority are cited below the median and a minority of articles are highly cited, which makes the average very unrepresentative of articles individually.
Thus, "The unit of measurement must be the article itself and not the journal".
There are also better choices for article level metrics now. Mendeley Reads, Altmetrics and more that provide a richer picture of an articles Impact.
In my view and that of many others, using IF for assessing research quality and researcher's careers is entirely a misuse of the measure since it was originally designed for journals not for individual researchers or individual research reports. Many colleagues, including myself, had extensively writing on this issue since long ago, but for University managers (many of whom are not researchers themselves) it is easy to solve the issue by using the wrong measure that gave them a false objectivity assurance, and since the culture they have promote (an Audit Culture) and impose in universities is based on indicators only (for managers’ convenience) the wrong and perverse idea that the IF measures quality of research is now globally accepted everywhere disguising its perverse consequences under a false objectivity mantle of quantification and comparability (of incomparable things as is often the case in social issues unless one take all due precautions as stated in Leiden’s manifesto in 2015) I invite you to consult my works on Research Gate or in Academia.edu and the works cited in my papers for a fully fledged argument against this abusive use of the measure.
Prof. Yuri Jack Gómez-Morales,
Many thanks for your enlightened opinion that I fully share. I totally agree with everything you have written.
For me, raising this issue is a way to express my dismay at the use of impact factor to evaluate the researchers and their publications. Thus, in my country, the recruitment of teachers-researchers in Life Sciences at University is based on the importance of impact factor of journals where they publish and this whatever the discipline, which is an injustice in itself. Your answer is a strong argument against these practices.
Pr Yuri Jack Gómez-Morales,
I think that initiating discussions on platforms, like Researchgate, and inviting for this purpose as many researchers as possible could perhaps advance thinking and banish these unfair practices.
Dr Monyer Abd Al-Fatlawi ,
Thank you for your interest in this question, but what is this other way? Could you enlighten me please.
I am associated with one journal which is not published for earning money to perform business. So, it is a free, open access journal.
But problem is that we can not afford money required in various purposes. As journal publication is a business, and everything can not be written here, we are facing many difficulties to get desired rating.
Publication in HIGH IF journal require HIGH amount of money in any name in most of the cases, particularly in open access publication.
But journal publication do not require such high amount of money.
The high IF journals taking high amount of money, but generally they do not pay any money to the reviewers.
I don't believe in existence of any positive correlation between Impact Factor of journals and the Quality of Research of the articles published in them.
Dr Shibabrata Pattanayak,
What must be denounced is not the existence of the impact factor itself, but the drift of its use.
Indeed, based on citations, the impact factor is a tool that has been conceived for librarians in making decisions on the purchase of journal
subscriptions. However, the use of this indicator has skidded in from the 1990s to become a measure routinely used for the evaluation of research and researchers. Yet, the impact factor is "widely acknowledged to be a poor indicator of the quality of individual papers". Thus, "the citation performance of individual papers cannot be inferred from the JIF" (Larivière et al., 2016).
Corporatism will always exist in any social sphere, be it in politics, administration, or education and publications. The greatest impact factor for a researcher is to have their scientific work useful to society without expecting that such an "impact factor" to be the priority element in this action. We are going to better disseminate knowledge, preferably in open access journals that have the same commitment, obviously we should think about maintaining this disclosure at a rational cost among stakeholders.
It is clear that the impact of an article is not where it is published, but where it is cited and what it is said about it.
I think impact factor indicates the journal's importance for the academic community and the extension this community. There is not relation with paper's quality. It also is not associate with the excellence of academic production of a researcher. Others parameters can be used to asses the academic production, as h-index. However, to use only one index ou parameter to asses is ever bad. It is necessary to consider the specificity of each area.
In Brazil, we have a crazy impact factor created by CAPES. CAPES make a ranking for all areas. For example, if I publish a paper in NATURE Journal, CAPES considers impact factor = ZERO because CAPES doesn´t include NATURE a Journal in Chemical Eng.
To me, H-index and citations are important and of course, is necessary to consider each area.
Dr. Ricardo Antonio Francisco Machado, could you please tell us on what criteria the CAPES is based in Brazil because this indicator seems to me unusual?
To Muhammad Rafiq Akhtar with my greetings
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/07/05/062109
I agree with Oum Kalthoum Ben Hassine that ' The unit of measurement must be the article itself and not the journal ' . Yuri Jack Gomez - Morales view that IF was for the journals & not for the articles is relevant .
I agree with argument of Oum Kalthoum Ben Hassine "... impact factor is widely acknowledged to be a poor indicator of the quality of individual papers ..." and Ricardo Antonio Francisco Machado "... H-index and citations are important and of course, is necessary to consider... ".
The journal Impact factor is a metric that attempts to quantify through the number of Citations the purported "average" quality of research that is published in a journal for 2 or 5 years for the respective 2-year and 5-year impact factors.
Whether it accurately measures the quality of published papers in a journal is subject to debate.
What is not subject to debate is the fact that the impact factor does NOT measure the quality of any individual paper, and hence the portfolio of papers by an academic researcher.
The purported quality of a published paper can be measured by the number of Citations it attracts.
The purported quality of the body of research by an academic researcher can be measured by the h-index.
The impact factor gives an average score for the total citations of all the papers published in a journal relative to the number of papers, over a specified period, such as 2 and 5 years for Clarivate Analytics, and 3 years for Scopus.
Many, if not most, journals rely on a relatively small % of extremely well cited papers to increase total citations, with most papers having much smaller numbers of citations.
The impact factor is a simple measure of the purported quality of a journal, and has its advantages and disadvantages.
The impact factor of a journal has no relevance for the presumed quality of any paper published in the journal.
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