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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.

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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/.