Abstract
I’ve been the Editor-in-Chief of
I became determined to better understand IFs by starting with some historical information. In 1955, the concept of an IF was introduced by Eugene Garfield, an American linguist and information scientist who was the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) [1, 2]. Garfield envisioned the IF as a tool to help librarians make knowledgeable decisions about which journals to purchase for their institutions. He designed the IF as the ratio of the number of citations in the current year to items published in the journal in the previous two years, divided by the number of substantive articles and reviews published in the same two years. Presently, an IF is calculated in a similar manner by dividing the number of times articles in a journal that are cited in a specific year by the number of citable items published in the previous two years. For example, an IF of 3 means that the average number of times all citable articles published in the previous two years were cited isthree.
Let’s go back to the history of the IF. It wasn’t until 1963 that the IF gained prominence. Garfield, now working with Irving H. Sher at ISI, decided that the IF would assist in the selection of journals for the Science Citation Index (SCI). In 1975, the IF was formally introduced with the publication of Journal Citation Reports [3, 4].
I want to underscore that the IF was not originally intended to be a measure of a journal’s quality, influence or importance. However, over time, it became widely embraced as a metric for evaluating journals, researchers, and institutions of higher education. In many academicians’ promotion and tenure review, the IF of the journals in which they have published their work is taken into high consideration.
It’s important to share that Garfield cautioned against the misuse of the IF by stressing that it should not be used as the sole criterion for evaluating research or researchers. This was a wise statement as the IF doesn’t necessarily reflect the quality of individual papers or researchers, nor does it account for differences between scientific fields [5]. I highly recommend reading the paper, “The impact-factors debate: the ISI’s uses and limits” by Moed for more details of the challenges of the IF [5].
It is important to emphasize that these metrics merely represent a single perspective in the valuation of
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