Escape from the impact factor
By Philip Campbell. 2008
159 citations recorded by the source corpus.
As Editor-in-Chief of the journal Nature, I am concerned by the tendency within acade- mic administrations to focus on a journal's impact factor when judging the worth of scientific contri- butions by researchers, affecting promotions, recruitment and, in some countries, financial bonuses for each paper. Our own internal research demonstrates how a high journal impact factor can be the skewed result of many citations of a few papers rather than the average level of the majority, reduc- ing its value as an objective measure of an individual paper. Proposed alternative indices have their own drawbacks. Many researchers say that their important work has been published in low-impact journals. Focusing on the citations of individual papers is a more reliable indicator of an individual's impact. A positive development is the increasing ability to track the contributions of individuals by means of author-contribution statements and perhaps, in the future, citability of components of papers rather than the whole. There are attempts to escape the hierarchy of high-impact-factor jour- nals by means of undifferentiated databases of peer-reviewed papers such as PLoS One. It remains to be seen whether that model will help outstanding work to rise to due recognition regardless of editorial selectivity. Although the current system may be effective at measuring merit on national and institutional scales, the most effective and fair analysis of a person's contribution derives from a direct assessment of individual papers, regardless of where they were published.
Subfields: Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science, Statistics and Probability
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1582a0b949af077f999882aca1155a0fe8e3d84f
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Citations in the corpus
- Impact factor: outdated artefact or stepping-stone to journal certification? (2011, background): “Amongst the academics who contribute articles and reviews, there is much more scepticism (e.g., Simons 2008), including some editors and publishers who have called for reform (e.g., Campbell 2008, Patterson 2009).”
- Bridging the Gap: How Can Information Access and Exchange Between Conservation Biologists and Field Practitioners be Improved for Better Conservation Outcomes? (2009, background): “The measure of the impact of a journal remains the yardstick by which research scientists judge their career development and scientific credibility although the methods by which ‘impact’ is assessed has recently been questioned (see Wilson 2007, Campbell 2008).”
- Out of the Loop: Why Research Rarely Reaches Policy Makers and the Public and What Can be Done (2009, background): “However, criticism of performance measurement systems, journal’s ‘impact factor’ and the peer-review process is mounting (Mooney 2004, Brante 2005, Sparkes 2006, Campbell 2008).”