Scholarship: Why is Impact Factor regarded more important than Impact?
By: Dr Yurgos Politis
Tags: Impact Factor, Publishing, Academic Writing, Academic Publishing, Social Impact

During the 1st semester of my Physics degree we had a lab in metallurgy. We were given the raw material, an instruction manual and the machinery we would need to make a hammer. This was my creation, 25 years ago, which my parents have been using occasionally since then. I was so proud of it despite all its flaws. I created something useful that had (minimal) impact on lives of others.

For the next 15 years I was involved in teaching and research at different levels, but I would struggle to see where I had any meaningful impact.

Then I got involved with research in the field of Higher Education, exploring topics related to the academic profession and how it has evolved since the 1990, the new roles and duties thrust upon academics and how that has affected teaching and research functions. Controversial themes are those around the role and usefulness of University Rankings and Publishing in high Impact Factor journals.

At that stage I had only 1 peer reviewed publication to my name, and being influenced by the talk around the importance of Impact Factor I tried unsuccessfully for almost 3 years to publish the 2nd paper from my PhD in top journals in the field (Science Education). I never published that paper after 2 re-submissions. That stung!

Fast forward to 2016 when I started a Marie Curie fellowship with the ASSISTID programme exploring technologies that can help people with neurodevelopmental disabilities (See blogpost: https://yurgos-politis.medium.com/marie-curie-fellowship-funded-period-2016-2019-ongoing-86fd84b1cd8c). It was a departure from my previous work, but it promised to be a fulfilling experience and had the potential to have a positive impact on people’s lives that would be tangible, purposeful and uplifting. It was all those things, because I employed a Participator Design approach (https://www.neurodiversityindesign.org/), which involved the target audience at all stages of the project and gave them a voice.

That is a highlight of my academic life (can’t really describe it as a career since it has been so precarious in nature) thus far, and by far. My work had meaning, value and impact.

It was then time to move on to an academic post. I had a few interviews lined up, but one stands out. Firstly, it was the fact that I was being interviewed in front of 6 people, which is daunting — how do you keep eye contact with all of them? But more importantly, it was when a question about publications came up. I was asked to identify high Impact Factor journals I would submit my work to in the future. The gist of my answer was that I believed if the articles are of high quality, then they will find the readership regardless of where they were published. A senior academic from Australia was the only panel member to agree with the premise. I could sense disapproval from the others despite mentioning that this was the position of a number of Nobel Laureates who were questioning the value of Journal Impact Factor. Unfortunately I couldn’t remember any of their names.

Coming to the present and while I was browsing some social medium, I came across that piece, which felt great (it wasn’t a figment of my imagination!).

Nobel Laureates over the years have questioned academia’s over-reliance on Impact factors at judging someone’s research outputs, during Nobel Prize Inspiration Initiative events. It is firstly really important to point out the primary role of the Impact Factor. Randy Schekman (Nobel in Physiology/Medicine) reminds us that it was designed as a tool to help libraries select journals for subscription. Bruce Beutler (Nobel in Physiology/Medicine) believes that where you publish your work matters (and suggests strategies to make that decision), he stresses though that academics should focus on engaging in high-quality research.

Peter Doherty (Nobel in Physiology/Medicine) believes that we should pick the journals where we publish our work where most people in the field can access and read it, partly because he thinks impact factors are forcing journal editors to select papers based on the popularity of the themes they cover rather than the initial core idea (https://youtu.be/zALArIV6Uqc).

And finally, it would be impossible to ignore Paul Nurse’s (Nobel in Physiology/Medicine) statement that a lot of rubbish is published in high Impact Journals!!!! It is therefore important that universities during hiring or promotion exercises should judge applicants not based on the Impact Factor of journals they have published in but whether they have an intimate knowledge of their research. Randy Schekman goes a step further and suggests that they should be judged for the Impact their research has had. He proposes that academics should prepare an Impact Statement describing their key discoveries. These should be included in their CV (for instance 250–300 word piece) and serve as the basis for short-listing candidates.

What would your Impact Statement include?

Note: It is noteworthy that all Nobel Laureates came from the same fields and were all men. Is it representative of the wider academic community’s views on this topic i wonder?