Impact factor: Mutation, manipulation, and distortion

Abstract

Currently, there is an increased dependency on the impact factor in scientific research publications. Sometimes the overzealousness in implementing the impact factor value to a publication is detrimental to the growth of the scientific authors, especially the junior lot, for no fault of theirs. The inept and myopic application of the impact factor defeats the purpose of making the value judgment and hence has been criticized by many learned authors. The scientist Eugene Garfield, who formulated the impact factor, feels wrong that it is being not judiciously used. A corollary is the invention dynamite by Alfred Nobel which instead of helping, aiding, and reducing human effort and endeavor it was more misused for human annihilation and pained the scientist who gave it to the world. The authors reexamine the application of impact factor to scientific manuscripts for rightful application of the value judgment.

Biased, wrong and counterfeited evidences published during the COVID-19 pandemic, a systematic review of retracted COVID-19 papers

“…Overall, journals' IF was found to be relatively high and with high variance. This means IF cannot always be considered as a guarantee for peer-review quality, as various authors have stated in their work (Vrabel 2019;Paulus et al 2018;Juyal et al 2019).…”

Twenty‐One for 2021: The Most Influential Papers in Laryngology Since 2000

“…Although many of the papers included in our list have been highly cited, and that was not necessarily required for inclusion. Number of citations is one method to assess the influence of a paper, but it is also heavily influenced by the journal impact factor, the reputation of the authors, the frequency of self‐citation, the number of previous citations, and the amount of time since the paper was published 1,14,40,41 . In the twenty‐first century, other methods of measuring the impact of research are index computations and social media 42,43 .…”

“…Number of citations is one method to assess the influence of a paper, but it is also heavily influenced by the journal impact factor, the reputation of the authors, the frequency of self-citation, the number of previous citations, and the amount of time since the paper was published. 1,14,40,41 In the twenty-first century, other methods of measuring the impact of research are index computations and social media. 42,43 Although the average number of citations per year was used to augment the nomination-generated list from Round 1 voting, our study relied more on expert consensus generated through a modified Delphi method than on the number or frequency of citations.…”

Characteristics and Research Techniques Associated with the Journal Impact Factor and Other Key Metrics in Pharmacology Journals

“…It is possible that original research articles published in such journals might have had different characteristics from what we observed in the primary research journals. However, the present study was designed to include only the primary research journals in order to minimize the effects of inherent biases in the JIF calculation on the study endpoints [41]. It is widely acknowledged that JIF calculations are highly vulnerable to manipulations by increasing the number of non-citable items (e.g., editorials and commentaries) which may be cited but are not counted in the denominator of the JIF calculation [42,43].…”