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Text of the page (random words):
used to compare journals across disciplines impact factors are sometimes used to evaluate not only the journals but the papers therein thereby devaluing papers in certain subjects 32 in 2004 the higher education funding council for england was urged by the house of commons science and technology select committee to remind research assessment exercise panels that they are obliged to assess the quality of the content of individual articles not the reputation of the journal in which they are published 33 other studies have repeatedly stated that impact factor is a metric for journals and should not be used to assess individual researchers or institutions 34 35 36 questionable editorial policies that affect the impact factor edit see also conflicts of interest in academic publishing cois of journals because impact factor is commonly accepted as a proxy for research quality some journals adopt editorial policies and practices some acceptable and some of dubious purpose to increase their impact factor 37 38 for example journals may publish a larger percentage of review articles which generally are cited more than research reports 8 research undertaken in 2020 on dentistry journals concluded that the publication of systematic reviews have significant effect on the journal impact factor while papers publishing clinical trials bear no influence on this factor greater yearly average of published papers means a higher impact factor 39 journals may also attempt to limit the number of citable items i e the denominator of the impact factor equation either by declining to publish articles that are unlikely to be cited such as case reports in medical journals or by altering articles e g by not allowing an abstract or bibliography in hopes that journal citation reports will not deem it a citable item as a result of negotiations over whether items are citable impact factor variations of more than 300 have been observed 40 items considered to be uncitable and thus are not incorporated in impact factor calculations can if cited still enter into the numerator part of the equation despite the ease with which such citations could be excluded this effect is hard to evaluate for the distinction between editorial comment and short original articles is not always obvious for example letters to the editor may be part of either class another less insidious tactic journals employ is to publish a large portion of its papers or at least the papers expected to be highly cited early in the calendar year this gives those papers more time to gather citations several methods not necessarily with nefarious intent exist for a journal to cite articles in the same journal which will increase the journal s impact factor 41 42 beyond editorial policies that may skew the impact factor journals can take overt steps to game the system for example in 2007 the specialist journal folia phoniatrica et logopaedica with an impact factor of 0 66 published an editorial that cited all its articles from 2005 to 2006 in a protest against the absurd scientific situation in some countries related to use of the impact factor 43 the large number of citations meant that the impact factor for that journal increased to 1 44 as a result of the increase the journal was not included in the 2008 and 2009 journal citation reports 44 coercive citation is a practice in which an editor forces an author to add extraneous citations to an article before the journal will agree to publish it in order to inflate the journal s impact factor 45 a survey published in 2012 indicates that coercive citation has been experienced by one in five researchers working in economics sociology psychology and multiple business disciplines and it is more common in business and in journals with a lower impact factor 46 editors of leading business journals banded together to disavow the practice 47 however cases of coercive citation have occasionally been reported for other disciplines 48 assumed correlation between impact factor and quality edit the journal impact factor was originally designed by eugene garfield as a metric to help librarians make decisions about which journals were worth indexing as the jif aggregates the number of citations to articles published in each journal since then the jif has become associated as a mark of journal quality and gained widespread use for evaluation of research and researchers instead even at the institutional level it thus has significant impact on steering research practices and behaviors 2 49 50 by 2010 national and international research funding institutions were already starting to point out that numerical indicators such as the jif should not be considered as a measure of quality note 1 in fact research was indicating that the jif is a highly manipulated metric 51 52 53 and the justification for its continued widespread use beyond its original narrow purpose seems due to its simplicity easily calculable and comparable number rather than any actual relationship to research quality 54 55 56 empirical evidence shows that the misuse of the jif and journal ranking metrics in general has a number of negative consequences for the scholarly communication system these include gaps between the reach of a journal and the quality of its individual papers 24 and insufficient coverage of social sciences and humanities as well as research outputs from across latin america africa and south east asia 57 additional drawbacks include the marginalization of research in vernacular languages and on locally relevant topics and inducement to unethical authorship and citation practices more generally the impact factor fosters a reputation economy where scientific success is based on publishing in prestigious journals ahead of actual research qualities such as rigorous methods replicability and social impact using journal prestige and the jif to cultivate a competition regime in academia has been shown to have deleterious effects on research quality 58 a number of regional and international initiatives are now providing and suggesting alternative research assessment systems including key documents such as the leiden manifesto note 2 and the san francisco declaration on research assessment dora plan s calls for a broader adoption and implementation of such initiatives alongside fundamental changes in the scholarly communication system note 3 as appropriate measures of quality for authors and research concepts of research excellence should be remodelled around transparent workflows and accessible research results 59 60 61 jifs are still regularly used to evaluate research in many countries which is a problem since a number of issues remain around the opacity of the metric and the fact that it is often negotiated by publishers 19 62 63 negotiated values edit results of an impact factor can change dramatically depending on which items are considered as citable and therefore included in the denominator 64 one notorious example of this occurred in 1988 when it was decided that meeting abstracts published in faseb journal would no longer be included in the denominator the journal s impact factor jumped from 0 24 in 1988 to 18 3 in 1989 65 publishers routinely discuss with clarivate how to improve the accuracy of their journals impact factor and therefore get higher scores 24 40 such discussions routinely produce negotiated values which result in dramatic changes in the observed scores for dozens of journals sometimes after unrelated events like the purchase by one of the larger publishers 66 distribution skewness edit journal impact factors are influenced heavily by a small number of highly cited papers most papers published in 2013 14 received many fewer citations than indicated by the impact factor two journals nature blue and plos one orange are shown to represent a highly cited and less cited journal respectively the high citation impact of nature is derived from relatively few highly cited papers modified after callaway 2016 67 because citation counts have highly skewed distributions 23 the mean number of citations is potentially misleading if used to gauge the typical impact of articles in the journal rather than the overall impact of the journal itself 68 for example about 90 of nature s 2004 impact factor was based on only a quarter of its publications thus the actual number of citations for a single article in the journal is in most cases much lower than the mean number of citations across articles 69 furthermore the strength of the relationship between impact factors of journals and the citation rates of the papers therein has been steadily decreasing since articles began to be available digitally 70 the effect of outliers can be seen in the case of the article a short history of shelx which included this sentence this paper could serve as a general literature citation when one or more of the open source shelx programs and the bruker axs version shelxtl are employed in the course of a crystal structure determination this article received more than 6 600 citations as a consequence the impact factor of the journal acta crystallographica section a rose from 2 051 in 2008 to 49 926 in 2009 more than nature at 31 434 and science at 28 103 71 the second most cited article in acta crystallographica section a in 2008 had only 28 citations 72 critics of the jif state that use of the arithmetic mean in its calculation is problematic because the pattern of citation distribution is skewed 73 and citation distributions metrics have been proposed as an alternative to impact factors 74 75 76 however there have also been pleas to take a more nuanced approach to judging the distribution skewness of the impact factor ludo waltman and vincent antonio traag in their 2021 paper ran numerous simulations and concluded that statistical objections against the use of the if at the level of individual articles are not convincing and that the if may be a more accurate indicator of the value of an article than the number of citations of the article 1 reproducibility edit while the underlying mathematical model is publicly known the dataset which is used to calculate the jif is not publicly available this prompted criticism just as scientists would not accept the findings in a scientific paper without seeing the primary data so should they not rely on thomson scientific s impact factor which is based on hidden data 19 however a 2019 article demonstrated that with access to the data and careful cleaning the jif can be reproduced although this required much labour to achieve 77 a 2020 research paper went further it indicated that by querying open access or partly open access databases like google scholar researchgate and scopus it is possible to calculate approximate impact factors without the need to purchase web of science jcr 78 broader negative impact on science edit just as the impact factor has attracted criticism for various immediate problems associated with its application so has there also been criticism that its application undermines the broader process of science research has indicated that bibliometrics figures particularly the impact factor decrease the quality of peer review an article receives 79 cause a reluctance to share data 21 decrease the quality of articles 80 and a reduce the scope of publishable research for many researchers the only research questions and projects that appear viable are those that can meet the demand of scoring well in terms of metric performance indicators and chiefly the journal impact factor 21 furthermore the process of publication and science is slowed down authors automatically try to publish with the journals with the highest impact factor as editors and reviewers are tasked with reviewing papers that are not submitted to the most appropriate venues 77 institutional responses to criticism of the impact factor edit given the growing criticism and its widespread usage as a means of research assessment organisations and institutions have begun to take steps to move away from the journal impact factor in november 2007 the european association of science editors ease issued an official statement recommending that journal impact factors are used only and cautiously for measuring and comparing the influence of entire journals but not for the assessment of single papers and certainly not for the assessment of researchers or research programmes 81 in july 2008 the international council for science committee on freedom and responsibility in the conduct of science issued a statement on publication practices and indices and the role of peer review in research assessment suggesting many possible solutions e g considering a limit number of publications per year to be taken into consideration for each scientist or even penalising scientists for an excessive number of publications per year e g more than 20 82 in february 2010 the german research foundation published new guidelines to reduce the number of publications that could be submitted when applying for funding the focus has not been on what research someone has done but rather how many papers have been published and where they noted that for decisions concerning performance based funding allocations postdoctoral qualifications appointments or reviewing funding proposals where increasing importance has been given to numerical indicators such as the h index and the impact factor 83 the uk s research assessment exercise for 2014 also banned the journal impact factor 84 although evidence suggested that this ban was often ignored 85 in response to growing concerns over the inappropriate use of journal impact factors in evaluating scientific outputs and scientists themselves the american society for cell biology together with a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals created the san francisco declaration on research assessment dora released in may 2013 dora has garnered support from thousands of individuals and hundreds of institutions 28 including in march 2015 the league of european research universities a consortium of 21 of the most renowned research universities in europe 86 who have endorsed the document on the dora website publishers even those with high impact factors also recognised the flaws 87 nature magazine criticised the over reliance on jif pointing not just to its statistical flaws but to negative effects on science the resulting pressures and disappointments are nothing but demoralizing and in badly run labs can encourage sloppy research that for example fails to test assumptions thoroughly or to take all the data into account before submitting big claims 22 various publishers now use a mixture of metrics on their website the plos series of journals does not display the impact factor 88 microsoft academic took a similar view stating that h index ei sci and journal impact factors are not shown because the research literature has provided abundant evidence that these metrics 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