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Fortnightly Review: How can impact factors be improved?

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Impact factors are widely used to rank and evaluate journals. They are also often used inappropriately as surrogates in evaluation exercises. The inventor of the Science Citation Index warns against the indiscriminate use of these data. Fourteen year cumulative impact data for 10 leading medical journals provide a quantitative indicator of their long term influence. In the final analysis, impact simply reflects the ability of journals and editors to attract the best papers available.

Counting references to rank the use of scientific journals was reported as early as 1927 by Gross and Gross.¹ In 1955 I suggested that reference counting could measure "impact,"² but the term "impact factor" was not used until the publication of the 1961 Science Citation Index (SCI) in 1963. This led to a byproduct, Journal Citation Reports (JCR), and a burgeoning literature using bibliometric measures. From 1975 to 1989, JCR . . . [Full text of this article]

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