Impact factor and science publishing: what impact should it have on selecting journals in which we publish?

A year or so ago, I published an editorial about citations. In part, because young colleagues had started the process of citing reviews as primary citations rather than citing the original work. In addition, the fact that in the world of Google and other search engines, we have moved into cite by title or by the contents of the abstract without ever immersing ourselves in the nuances (ok, let’s just say reading) of the paper. However, citation of our work is important because our intellectual bank account is our published work and our value is based upon how this work is perceived (or cited) by others in our field. Yet, another important change in the little society we call science is the inappropriate use of Impact Factor (IF) to perceive value of people, of work, and of journals. So I ask you to consider a few questions. Has the use of IF evolved past what was ever intended by its inventor? What role, if any, should a journal’s IF have on whether we choose to publish our work in it? Should IF be used to evaluate the quality of individual work published in any given journal? Should IF be used to evaluate the performance of a faculty or whether a certain person should be hired over another person? Should IF be used to determine who gets a grant and who does not? Of course these questions can go on and on, but why do I raise them? Because it appears that we have collectively fallen into a deep love affair with IF and we run the risk of passing on this ill-advised affair to our students. In my Science Ethics course (BIMD 516), amongst the many topics taught on ethics, I teach a session about the rules, written and unwritten, regarding publishing one’s work in the scientific literature. One important lecture topic is about the value of IF and what this number means and what it does not mean. Unfortunately, I find graduate students’ perception of the importance of IF is much different than many of my colleagues who serve as their mentors and advisors. Similarly, I find that my colleagues, both here at the University of North Dakota and elsewhere have a false perception of what IF means and its ill-conceived use in evaluating individuals’ published work or as a measure of journal worthiness. To put it into perspective, IF is a population statistic that reflects how many citations of a journal’s papers published over a two-year period receive during the subsequent year. That is, citations referencing citable material published in 2012 and 2013 will be the bases for a journal’s IF in 2014. Or ‘‘The annual Journal Citation Reports impact factor is a ratio between citations and recent citable items published: a journal’s impact factor is calculated by dividing the number of current year citations to the source items published in that journal during the previous two years’’. Hence, it is not an indicator of potential future performance for any published paper nor is it an individual statistic, but rather a population statistic based upon the general population of what has been published. Simply put, an IF of 2 suggests two citations on average for each paper published over that 2 year period in the following year. So, is a journal with an IF of 2 half the quality of a journal with an IF of 4? Is it one-quarter of the value of a journal with an IF of 8? Alternatively, does publishing in a journal with an IF of 2 mean that my work E. J. Murphy (&) Department of Pharmacology, Physiology, and Therapeutics, University of North Dakota, 501 N. Columbia Rd., Grand Forks, ND 58202-9037, USA e-mail: eric.murphy@med.und.edu 1 ‘‘Introducing the Impact Factor’’ sourced from Thomson Reuters: http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/academic/ impact_factor/.