Attention, The journal impact factor is a good bibliometric tool. It is its use for career promotion and resource distribution that poses a problem. One of the 9 journals of the Entomological Society of America alerts us to the perversion of the impact factor. ESA journals are published by Oxford University Press. These are two successive editorials by David D Onstad, editor-in-chief of the Annals of the Entomological Society of America that attract our attention. He calls the impact factor a cryptocurrency!
Journal impact factor is NOT a measure of scientific or social worth of an article
This editorial is from January 3, 2024. I translate the beginning: In the 21st century, citations and journal impact factor (JIF) have become a kind of cryptocurrency. Entomologists and their supervisors use these calculated numbers to easily quantify scientific contributions compared to more traditional methods such as the number of published and peer-reviewed articles, or even qualitative estimates of research value.
The author uses examples from avocado, a $12 billion market, but with very few publications in scientific journals, and not in journals with a high impact factor. And the articles are rarely cited. Searching for data on lawyers in high impact factor journals turns up almost nothing. In addition, very old articles have value, and much more value than those articles less than two years old which contribute to the calculation of the impact factor.
The ethical and social effects of the obsession over Journal Impact Factor
This editorial is from March 2024, with a co-author. I translate the extract which corresponds to the first paragraph: The current obsession with journal impact factor (JIF) has a strong and, in most cases, deleterious influence on scientists and scientific societies (Schloss and Cuomo, 2023). In a previous editorial, Onstad (2024) showed that the JIF is of little use and can be misleading in assessing the value of entomological publications. He concluded that “the JIF was not created for use in the scientific reward system, but rather to allow publishers to compete with each other.” It does not represent a quantitative measure of the relative value of an author or article to society or science. Entomologists should not be influenced by the JIF when submitting, reading or judging an article. In the discussion that follows, we highlight the implications for the entomological community of the current obsession with JIFs and citations. We argue that this obsession has a disproportionately negative effect on women, small cohorts of scientists working in narrowly circumscribed fields, and nonprofit scientific corporations. We end with a call to entomologists to help counteract this trend.
The religion of the impact factor
Well-researched and fascinating article which shows the naivety of most of these major decision-makers who have been converted. I quote the first paragraph of an article by Jacques Robert in Innovations & Therapeutics in Oncology from March-April 2024: A new religion was born during the 20th century: that of the impact factor. Like all great religions, it came into the world in a restricted community of wise believers who established its dogmas, then spread among the people receiving the message, generating conquests along the way, giving rise to heresies, anathemas and deviances. And then, in a few years, it was adopted by the crowd of converts around the world who made it a tool for intensive brain-braining. How did we get here ? This article is well documented and describes manipulations of the impact factor, with 30 references.
It’s exhausting to explain for 30 years the perversions caused by the impact factor
On this blog, I have published posts on this misconduct, and even mentioned the requiem of the impact factor in 2021. Remember that in France in January 2011, the Academy of Sciences warned about this misconduct, then the R report Gaillard on the evolution of the hospital-university status in May 2011… but nothing happened, except the signing of DORA which did not change the evaluations!
For more than 25 years, articles have denounced these bad practices, with PO Seglen in 1997 in the BMJ: Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research
Since 2002, I have published articles in French journals to explain these misbehaviours, without being heard of course! The image above is an example from a 2015 article….
I thank D Onstad and J Robert
