Nhmrc Removes Journal Impact Factors from Peer Review of Individual Research Grant and Fellowship Applications

On the advice of Research Committee, NHMRC will no longer request Journal Impact Factors (JIF) as part of any applications for funding nor use these in peer review of individual applications. Journal Impact Factor is not a sound basis upon which to judge the impact of individual papers. The JIF of any journal does not describe the impact, importance or quality of any individual paper. Instead, it describes the average citations for all papers in that journal over a two year period and thus is not a description of the impact of each paper. Citations of individual papers in any journal range from zero to many hundreds, even thousands for a landmark or methodological paper. Regardless of the JIF of the journal, whether high or low, the range and variance of citations to individual papers is very large. It is therefore not logically sound to equate the " impact " of the journal, with the " impact " of each paper in that journal. The simplistic example below may help to illustrate this point. Let's compare two imaginary journals that each