Eliminating the impact of the Impact Factor

The Impact Factor is the most popular numerical measure of a scientist's work. Despite many well-documented flaws, the Impact Factor is commonly used in recruitment, appointment, and funding decisions. A diverse group of stakehold-ers is now making a concerted effort to combat misuse of the Impact Factor and is calling for the development of more accurate measures to assess research. The group has issued the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. You too can join the campaign. It is in the nature of us scientists to measure things—even things that are difficult to quantify such as an individual scien-tist's performance and impact. A commonly used metric to describe scientific impact is the journal Impact Factor (IF). The IF is a journal-specific number that is calculated as the ratio of total citations a journal receives over the preceding two years divided by the total number of cit-able articles published during that time. Each paper in a given journal then is described not by its own citation tally but rather by the journal-wide Impact Factor. The IF is pervasive in the scientific community. Scientists refer to it casually in conversation to convince colleagues of the importance of their own papers, or they wonder how a paper ended up in " a journal with such a high Impact Factor. " Students and postdocs want to publish only in " high Impact Factor " journals, and the IF is frequently used in recruitment , tenure, and granting decisions when a candidate's past publication performance is assessed. The IF was never meant to be used in that way! It was introduced in the early 1960s to aid librarians in stocking their shelves with the journals that were most important to their constituents. It was not intended to assess the research quality or impact of a single paper, let alone an individual scientist's performance. Numerous flaws in the IF have been pointed out over the years. Some of the more troublesome shortcomings are: a journal's IF can be driven by a few, extremely highly cited articles, yet all articles published in a given journal, even those that are never cited, are presumed to have the same IF; the IF does not say anything about an individual article, yet conclusions about a particular paper are often drawn; the IF can be manipulated by journals in many ways, for example by publishing more review articles, which are generally …