A glance at the current issue of BMJ: A debate on the impact factor
The measure, known as the “impact factor,” tallies citations to a journal’s articles in other scientific papers. Ms. Brown reports that the increasing importance given to impact factors may be forcing editors to focus more on gathering citations than on their readers.
More troubling, she writes, is that universities and other institutions that support academic research “have begun using the impact factor of journals in which researchers most frequently publish to guide decisions on appointments, grant allocations, and science policy.” This trend has shifted financial resources away from many disciplines whose journals have lower impact factors, she writes, particularly fields within “the clinical research base.”
In an accompanying pair of essays, two British scholars -- Gareth Williams, dean of the faculty of medicine and dentistry at the University of Bristol, and Richard Hobbs, a professor and head of the department of primary care and general practice at the University of Birmingham -- debate whether academic publishing should abandon the impact factor.
Dr. Williams describes the measure as misleading, and says it should be ditched. With impact factors, he writes, “it doesn’t even matter if a paper turns out to be rubbish -- or even if the only reason for citing it is to point this out -- because all citations count and contribute equally to the journal’s impact factor.” He says that “it is patently absurd to believe that the intrinsic value of a piece of research is increased just because the editor of a ‘good’ journal takes a shine to it.”
Mr. Hobbs acknowledges flaws in the gauge but says refinement is the answer. With the thousands of journals in existence, he writes, there needs to be “a measure of quality.” He proposes several ways to make the system more accurate. For example, “we could consider scoring journals on only their most important papers, since the most-cited 15 percent of articles account for 50 percent of citations, and the most-cited 50 percent of articles account for 90 percent of the citations.”
Ms. Brown’s article, “How Impact Factors Changed Medical Publishing -- and Science,” is available to subscribers or for purchase on the journal’s Web site. The essays by Dr. Williams, and by Mr. Hobbs, are available on the journal’s Web site as well.
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