Victor Henning and William Gunn question the usefulness of the impact factor, the measure of an academic publication's influence, in an article in The Guardian's Higher Education Network blog this week.
Henning and Gunn argue that impact factors have not aged gracefully, and reliance on the measure to distinguish good research from bad, may be misguided in the digital age. After all, "influence is only one dimension of importance," the two write.
In particular, impact factors are being used increasingly, and mistakenly, to "compare people," the authors argue. "While some institutions now say they disallow the use of the IF in decision making, the steep competition for a slot in a high IF journal … indicates otherwise," Henning and Gunn write.
They suggest newer tools that take a more "multi-dimensional approach" to calculating the value of a publication may give a better sense of a publication's value, mentioning the "Total-Impact" aggregator, as well as Henning and Gunn's own company, Mendeley.
The two argue these newer tools fundamentally rely on growing openness and "interoperability" in scientific and academic publishing, that allow "librarians, researchers, and funders to pick and choose the data that's most meaningful for any particular use at any particular time."
"Tempering the need to publish in high-IF journals and moving towards open access publishing models like PLOS One — which reviews papers on rigour and technical merit, rather than perceived significance — will give us the chance the make the next 50 years of science look very different. We can improve the quality, transparency, and availability of research for all," the two write.
While the impact factor of a
While the impact factor of a journal might reflect some general measure of quality and significance, this is does not necessarily equally apply to the degree of rigour of performance, peer-review and importance of individual scientific reports within the same journal. Ultimately, the best indication of the impact of a scientific manuscript is how highly it becomes cited by others over time.
Few scientists look for the latest research findings by specifically targeting the highest impact factor journals. With over 10,000 scientific journals presently publishing around a million scientific papers per year, this would be rather fool-hardy. Instead, the use of PubMed and other search engines provide easy and comprehensive coverage on the topics most relevant to the enquiring scientist. If open-access is also available, there will probably be an even better chance that the work will be seen and used.
Over a hundred years ago, most scientists published their own findings as monographs rather than articles in journals. Perhaps in the near future, more scientists will directly publish their research on their own open-access websites. This is a direction that I plan to pursue myself shortly.