La invalidez del Factor de Impacto como indicador del impacto de las revistas científicas latinoamericanas

Abstract

The invalidity of the Impact Factor as indicator of the impact of Latin American scientific journals. Use of the Impact Factor is currently being discarded in industrialized countries where, to name one case, up to 40% of the articles published in Nature are never cited, despite the high Impact Factor of that journal. However, it is still used in Latin America to evaluate journals and authors, potentially influencing who are given positions and who receives funding. To find out how valid the Impact Factor is for Latin American research, I used the database BINABITROP to see how much of the relevant literature was used to measure impact. I found that the Science Citation Index (SCI) excluded 96% of the relevant literature when measuring the impact of biological articles about Costa Rica for the studied year (2011). Therefore, the impact of Latin American science is unknown and the Impact Factor should not be used to assess how often a journal, institution or author are cited. Rev. Biol. Trop. 62 (1): 9-13. Epub 2014 March 01.

Bibliometry of the Revista de Biología Tropical / International Journal of Tropical Biology and Conservation: document types, languages, countries, institutions, citations and article lifespan

“…In the case of the Revista, we found the same problem: the two year window used to calculate the impact hides the real impact, which happens mostly after the Web of Science stops counting citations. This is particularly serious for the Revista because most of the citations occur along a period of three decades and because most of the journals that deal with tropical biology are never checked by the Science Citation Index to count the citations (Monge-Nájera, 2014). Considering this problem, it has been recommended that researchers, educators and administrators used the so called "non-core journals" to get a wider and more representative view of science (Crawley-Low, 2006) and that they check the quality of the articles themselves, which may or may not be related to the impact factor (Jones, 1999).…”

Bibliometry of Panama publications in the Science Citation Index Expanded: publication type, language, fields, authors and institutions

“…the number of researchers grows as the population grows; furthermore, increasing awareness of the importance of research leads to better financing and better trained scientists in many countries. But it can also be caused by efforts in the SCI-EXPANDED to increase the number of Latin American journals it covers now that its methods are increasingly under criticism (Monge-Nájera, 2014). In any case the increasing number of publications parallels a general growth of scientific output in most of Latin America (Michan & Llorente-Bousquets, 2010;Ramos et al, 2011;Barreto et al, 2012).…”

Bibliometrics of Nicaraguan publications in the Science Citation Index Expanded

“…Errors in the data were reviewed by hand by a person familiar with the Nicaraguan research institutions (JMN). We obtained each journal's impact factor from the 2014 JCR (IF 2014 ) and article Web of Science Core Collection citations from publication to the end of 2014 (TC 2014 ;Wang, Yu, & Ho, 2010). We also used C 2014 , the total number of citations of a paper in 2014 only (Ho, 2012) and citations per total publications (TP) since publication (CPP = TC 2014 /TP).…”

“…Probably most of the scientific production of Nicaraguan scientists is published in Spanish in the many journals published locally (MongeNájera, 2002;list in latindex.unam.mx). The SCIEXPANDED does not include those journals and thus misses both much of the Nicaraguan scientific production and most of its citations (this is a problem affecting all tropical countries: Monge-Nájera, 2014;Monge-Nájera & Ho, 2015). In other words, the Science Citation Index cannot be used alone to assess the real impact of Nicaraguan publications in world science.…”