a matter of considerable chagrin. All the IF databases of which I am aware are hopelessly skewed by American legal publication and publications. They are dominated by the hundreds of student-edited American law journals and by the habits of reading and scholarship of American academia. For EJIL this is a matter of particular pique. These databases not only exclude most international law journals from non-English speaking countries, which is where a huge part of our readership and authorship come from, but they exclude all but a few handfuls of non-American English-language international law journals. In other words, the current generators of IF essentially measure the number of times EJIL articles are cited in mostly American law journals. I would bet that our total number of citations in non-American law journals far exceeds our citations in American law journals. I would be disappointed if this were not the case. And I would bet that the gap between our overall number of citations if all these other journals were computed and the number as generated by the American-dominated databases would be greater than for most American journals which are mostly cited within the USA. That is why, although I accept in principle that some form of objective, quantifiable measurement of influence has its uses, I refuse to accept the current American-dominated academic rating agencies as a valid measurement for European journals such as EJIL , and I urge the same attitude of disdain among my fellow European and, indeed, non-American law journal