The San Francisco group agreed that the JIF, which ranks scholarly journals by the average number of citations their articles attract in a set period, has become an obsession in world science. Impact factors warp the way that research is conducted, reported, and funded. Over five months of discussion, the San Francisco declaration group moved from an “insurrection,” in the words of one publisher, against the use of the prominent two-year JIF to a wider reconsideration of scientific assessment. The DORA statement posted today makes 18 recommendations for change in the scientific culture at all levels—individual scientists, publishers, institutions, funding agencies, and the bibliometric services themselves—to reduce the dominant role of the JIF in evaluating research and researchers and instead to focus on the content of primary research papers, regardless of publication venue.
It has all been said before, of course. Research assessment “rests too heavily on the inflated status of the impact factor”, a Nature editorial noted in 2005; or as structural biologist Stephen Curry of Imperial College London put it in a recent blog post: “I am sick of impact factors and so is science”.
Even the company that creates the impact factor, Thomson Reuters, has issued advice that it does not measure the quality of an individual article in a journal, but rather correlates to the journal’s reputation in its field. (In response to DORA, Thomson Reuters notes that it’s the abuse of the JIF that is the problem, not the metric itself.)
W. Booth, G. Colomb, and J. Williams. Chicago guides to writing, editing, and publishing University of Chicago Press,, Chicago ; London :, 2nd ed. edition, (2003.)Previous ed.: 1995..