Every year, Clarivate’s annual citation reports are published and thousands of journals receive their first Impact Factors.
We know this metric remains important for many researchers, because the choice of where to publish is often constrained by institutional or funder requirements to publish in journals with Impact Factors. But Impact Factor alone tells us very little about a journal or any individual piece of research and this makes overreliance on it for research and researcher evaluation problematic.
What does Impact Factor really show us and how can other metrics help you make better-informed decisions?
What does an Impact Factor measure?
An Impact Factor is Clarivate’s index calculated from the mean number of citations published in the preceding two years. Along with other citation-based metrics, Impact Factor has become a proxy for quality and a signifier of prestige. Many institutions and funders require that researchers publish in a journal with an Impact Factor and this has inadvertently given indexers a lot of power to govern researcher choice. Clarivate’s decision to expand the selection process this year means more than 9000 journals from 3000 publishers have recently received an Impact Factor, helping to widen the choice for researchers choosing where to publish while reducing the influence of the subset of journals with impact factors.
Why is overreliance on Impact Factor problematic?
As the Impact Factor is a journal-level metric, it tells us very little about an individual piece of research or the researchers behind it. Despite this, it is often misleadingly used as a proxy for research quality and as a tool to evaluate researchers’ performance and thus influences decisions around funding and career progression. This has created perverse incentives for researchers, publishers, and institutions because journal rank and impact factor are considered the only metric that matters, rather than the rigor, integrity and impact of individual articles.
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” -- Goodhart’s Law
Enter DORA
The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, better known as DORA (and of which we are a proud signatory) is an initiative that aims to reduce reliance on journal-based metrics for assessment of individuals and find ways to assess research on its own merits. Researchers should be judged on what they publish and how they publish, not where they publish. Was your research conducted rigorously, ethically and to best-practice standards?
DORA encourages publishers to provide context when speaking about Impact Factor, so that this one metric can be assessed alongside other journal standards and performance metrics. It also encourages institutions and funding agencies to look beyond the impact factor when it comes to research and researcher assessment and to consider the broader range of impacts that an article and other research outputs, such as the data underlying the paper, can have.
Researcher choice
The expansion of researcher choice due to the larger number of journals is a benefit across the research community but it can make finding and choosing the right journal more challenging than ever. Given the prevalence of Impact Factors, what other metrics might you look at to make the choice about where to publish your research?
Transparent journal metrics
Nearly all of our journals now share a range of detailed metrics in their journal reports. We share data on our submission and rejection rates, median turnaround times, the median number of reviews per paper, abstracting and indexing, geographical distribution of readership, authorship and editorial boards make ups, and highlight some of the most widely read and cited content published in that journal. Our journal reports also include several citation-based metrics in addition to the Impact Factor, such as the Cite Score and Journal Citation Indicator, but more importantly these are accompanied by Citation Distribution charts showing the range of citations articles in a journal receive over the same period that the impact factor is calculated. This can show that some papers might receive many more citations than their Impact Factor might indicate and conversely, while a journal might have a high Impact Factor, many or most papers in that journal might receive one or no citations. Having a wide range of transparent journal level metrics can help you better understand any individual measure in context and make better-informed decisions when choosing where to publish.
So while it is easier said than done, don’t judge your own, or your peers’, research on where it is published. Look for journals that ensure your article can be discovered, accessed and built upon by your peers and that provide rigorous peer review within a reasonable amount of time.
This blog post is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). Illustration adapted from Adobe Stock by David Jury.