Intended for healthcare professionals

Rapid response to:

Feature

How impact factors changed medical publishing—and science

BMJ 2007; 334 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.39142.454086.AD (Published 15 March 2007) Cite this as: BMJ 2007;334:561

Rapid Response:

Are there good alternatives for the “Impact Factor” algorithm?

The impact factor represents a poor measure of the importance of an
individual paper taking into account that 80% of a journals impact factor
is determined by 20% of the papers published.
In the last years a lot of new indexes has been created to provide
alternatives for the IF algorithm: the Sevinc’s proposal of retouching the
IF not considering the number of self citations in the calculation is a
good example of different option.

Van Leeuwen and Moed have developed an alternative journal impact measure,
the Journal to Field Impact Score (JFIS), providing solutions to biases
incurred in 4 areas (“non-citable” items included in the numerator of the
IF calculation; the relative distribution of research articles; technical
notes and reviews, different citing behavior across subject fields; and
the fixed two-year citation window).

Asai proposed an Adjusted Impact Factor to count a weighted sum of
citations per month over a time period of four years.
There are other alternatives, such as Cited Half-Life Impact Factor (CHAL-
IF), Median Impact Factor (MIF), Disciplinary Impact Factor (DIF),
"Prestige Factor" (PF).
A particular notation is for the Euro-Factor (EF), born in Europe to
target the language bias (prevalence of the English tongue) and perceived
USA-centricity of the SCI database.

Perhaps the best choice to evaluate the real impact of a scientific
article or journal is to take into account different parameters and not
only one of them, avoiding the “IF supremacy” in the field of research and
fundings.

Competing interests:
None declared

Competing interests: No competing interests

19 March 2007
Gianluca Castelnuovo
Ph.D.,Psy.D and Researcher in Clinical Psychology
28824, Verbania, Italy.
Clinical Psychology Lab, San Giuseppe Hospital, IRCCS Istituto Auxologico Italiano