
Journal impact factors - issues and limitations
Many critics of impact factors highlight the potential for manipulation. Some of the main issues of concern are:
• Authors self-citing. This is less of a problem now where tools are creating options to exclude self-citations in calculations. Both WoS and Scopus provide this feature.
• In addition to the above point, groups of researchers may cite each other's work
• An increase in multiple authorship of papers
• Splitting outputs into many articles
• The possibility of strategic behaviour on the part of journal editors and publishers. For example, publishing issues early in the year which may be cited within that year; encouraging authors to cite other papers in their journals; publishing more review articles which tend to receive a higher number of citations compared to other types of articles.
My RI by University College Dublin, Dublin City University, Dublin Institute of Technology, The National University
of Ireland, Maynooth and the NDLR adapted by Marion Kelt, Glasgow Caledonian University is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.ndlr.ie/myri/.