Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research

Abstract

On this background, it is hardly surprising that alternative methods for evaluating research are being sought, such as citation rates and journal impact factors, which seem to be quantitative and objective indicators directly related to published science. The citation data are obtained from a database produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia, which continuously records scientific citations as represented by the reference lists of articles from a large number of the world's scientific journals. The references are rearranged in the database to show how many times each publication has been cited within a certain period, and by whom, and the results are published as the Science Citation Index (SCI). On the basis of the Science Citation Index and authors' publication lists, the annual citation rate of papers by a scientific author or research group can thus be calculated. Similarly, the citation rate of a scientific journal—known as the journal impact factor—can be calculated as the mean citation rate of all the articles contained in the journal.4 Journal impact factors, which are published annually in SCI Journal Citation Reports, are widely regarded as …