The Tyranny of the Impact Factor

Eugene Garfield, a linguist, is the remarkable founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). In the 1960s, Garfield came up with an intriguing concept that has become indispensable to the scientific community, one that he has bankrolled into an influential publishing industry. The concept is that citations in a scientific paper can be used to determine the importance of not only scientific research but also researchers and research journals (Garfield, 1979). The way it works is that ISI, using a prescribed list of journals, computerizes the citations of each paper of each issue and from this source of information extrapolates a number of intriguing statistics such as how many times a work is cited and who cites it. The basic assumption is that the importance and impact of a scientific work is directly related to the number of times it is cited. The current dogma is that if a paper is frequently cited it has To: Abbot Franz Cyrill Napp, Augustinian Monastery of Brno