Measuring Journals

By John Ewing

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955), attributed

The impact factor was created in the late 1950s as a way to measure a journal's value by calculating the average number of citations per article over a specific period of time. Since citations generally reflect the interest of scholars in an article, the impact factor ought to reflect the average interest in articles appearing in a journal. This seems to be a sensible use of citations.

But the impact factor has far outgrown its original purpose. A recent article [4] on the impact factor asserts that "impact factors have assumed so much power ... that they are starting to control the scientific enterprise" and that they "play a crucial role in hiring, tenure decisions, and the awarding of grants." The same article quotes Eugene Garfield, the creator of the impact factor, who laments: "We never predicted that people would turn this into an evaluation tool for giving out grants and funding."

People misuse the impact factor because there are no explicit principles governing its interpretation. The impact factor is used to measure the value of things for which it was never intended (articles and authors, for example), and it is used to make faulty comparisons between unlike objects, including journals themselves.

This is not a new problem. For decades, scholars have complained about...... MORE

(Also published in the Notices.)