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Advantages and disadvantages of using impact factors

Advantages include:

  • Accepting that they must be used carefully and that citation patterns are specific to particular areas of research, impact factors can be a useful tool when trying to find an objective measure of quality.
  • Impact factors are calculated from the number of citations received by the papers published in a named journal during the previous two years. In this way, they can reflect the changing status of a journal within a research field, as the number of citations increases or declines.

Disadvantages include:

  • Impact factors should not be used as a standard of comparison between disciplines. Citation practice depends very much on the subject area, with the result that a high impact factor for one discipline may look extremely low in comparison with another. Look at the following examples from the Journal Citation Reports, for impact factors for 2006:

Biology: the top 5 journals in the subject group, arranged by impact factor

PLoS Biology

14.101

FASEB Journal

6.721

Bioessays

5.965

Quarterly Review of Biology

5.944

Biological Reviews

5.565

Medicine: the top 5 journals in the subject group, arranged by impact factor

New England Journal of Medicine

51.296

Lancet

25.800

JAMA - Journal of the American Medical Association

23.175

Annals of Internal Medicine

14.780

PLoS Medicine

13.750


Critics point out that impact factors are calculated as an average for the total published output of a journal and that this information should not be used to gauge the importance of an individual research paper. A small number of papers published in a journal may have received a large proportion of the citations.

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PILOT - the Publication Process by Marion Kelt, GCU, Imperial College, London and East Midlands Research Group is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://cuba.coventry.ac.uk/emrsg/units/dissemination/