{"id":2069,"date":"2014-01-08T11:58:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-08T11:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/the-advance-and-decline-of-the-impact-factor\/"},"modified":"2025-01-15T06:45:27","modified_gmt":"2025-01-15T06:45:27","slug":"the-advance-and-decline-of-the-impact-factor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/the-advance-and-decline-of-the-impact-factor","title":{"rendered":"The advance and decline of the impact factor"},"content":{"rendered":"

The impact factor is one of the most discussed topics in the publishing and scientific community. Thomson Reuters assigns most journals a yearly impact factor (IF), which is the mean citation rate during that year for the papers published in that journal during the previous two years. Last month, Thomson Reuters released the much-awaited Journal Citation Reports (JCR), with the new journal impact factors for 2013. According to Thomson Reuters<\/a>, the latest JCR features 10,853 journal listings across 232 disciplines and 83 countries. A total of 379 journals received their first impact factor. Additionally, 37 journals were suppressed due to questionable citation activity. Suppressed journals are re-evaluated after two-years and it is decided whether they should be included in the JCR.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Here are some attention-grabbing highlights from the JCR: 66 journals were banned from the 2013 impact factor list because of excessive self-citation or \u2018citation stacking,\u2019 wherein journals cite themselves or each other excessively. According to Thomson Reuters, 55% journals show an increase whereas 45% show a decrease in impact factor this year. One such journal with a declined impact factor is PLoS ONE\u2014the world\u2019s largest journal by number of papers published. PLoS ONE\u2019s impact factor has dropped by 16%, from 4.4 in 2010 (when it published 6,749 articles) to 3.7 in 2012 (when it published 23,468 articles). Interestingly, while several people in the publishing industry are discussing details of the new JCR, some journals and researchers are not bothered by it. Why is this so?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Researchers and publishing professionals are well aware of the increasing criticisms against the impact factor. Last year, a new initiative was launched to make academic assessment less dependent on the impact factor. In December 2012, a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals gathered at the Annual Meeting of The American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco to discuss current issues related to how the quality of research output is evaluated and how scientific literature is cited. They also wanted to find ways to ensure that a journal\u2019s quality matched with the impact of its individual articles. In this meeting, they came up with a set of recommendations that is referred to as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)<\/a>. These recommendations mainly focus on practices relating to research articles published in peer-reviewed journals, and seek to find methods for improving the way in which the quality of research output is evaluated. The themes addressed in DORA are as follows:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n