Ditching Impact Factors for Deeper Data

A team of editors and researchers calls on journal publishers to use citation distributions as measures of publication quality rather than relying on much-derided impact factors.

Written byBob Grant

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Science journals should calculate more-detailed citation distributions to indicate the impact of individual studies published in their pages instead of relying on the less-transparent journal impact factor (IF), according to researchers and publishers who analyzed the data underlying these scores. “We hope that this analysis helps to expose the exaggerated value attributed to the JIF [journal impact factor] and strengthens the contention that it is an inappropriate indicator for the evaluation of research or researchers,” wrote the authors of a bioRxiv preprint published this week (July 5).

By calculating simple distribution frequencies for citations of papers published in a variety of journals, the team—which included 11 top journal editors from eLife, Science, Nature, PLOS, and others—found that up to 75 percent of the studies in a given journal had lower citation counts than that journal’s IF, which indicates the average number of citations an article in that title nets. “The authors are correct to point out that JIF should only be used as an aid to understand the impact of a journal,” James Pringle, head of industry development and innovation, IP and science at Thomson Reuters, which calculates journal IFs, told ScienceInsider. “JIF is a reflection of the citation performance of a journal as a whole unit, not as an assembly of ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
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From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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