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How Not To Use a Journal Impact Factor 2004 Impact Factor for Nature came from 25% of its papers.5 Typically, ∼15% of the papers in a given journal account for half of its citations.6 The citation data for 2015 for papers published in Science in 2013 and 2014 showed that the number of papers with 100 or more citations was nearly identical to the number of papers with two or fewer citations.7 Thus, for a 2013−2014 paper randomly selected from Science, it was just as likely that the paper had been cited two or fewer times as it was that it had been cited 100 times or more.
I&EC Research achieved its highest Impact Factor ever this year, at 3.14 (Clarivate Analytics, Journal Citation Reports, 2018). The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is a measure of the mean citedness in a given year of all articles published in a given journal during the previous two years. That is, the 2017 Impact Factor for a journal is the number of citations accrued in 2017 to articles published in 2015 and 2016, divided by that total number of articles. JIFs were first calculated and reported in the 1970s to help libraries make decisions regarding journal subscriptions. The idea was simple: comparing impact factors among a set of journals in a given field with common scope would help identify the journals of most frequent use to scholars and thereby help libraries decide how best to allocate limited subscription resources. This comparison of journals with common scope and field represents the proper use of impact factors. However, misuse of impact factors occurs when one uses them as article-level metrics. Jeremy Berg, editor of Science, published an editorial describing some mathematical modeling of citation distributions to disprove the notion that the JIF of the journal in which a given paper appears provides insight about the impact of that paper.1 Over 800 organizations have signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which advises against using JIFs “as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles...”.2 To help avoid contributing to an inappropriate focus on JIFs, the American Society for Microbiology eliminated impact factor information on their journal Web sites.3 Since impact factor season is upon us again, I felt it was timely to reflect on the following facts.
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THE PERSONAL IMPACT FACTOR I want to endorse a suggestion made elsewhere regarding use of an impact factor (IF) for individual researchers.8,9 It is a simple matter for any individual to count their 2015 and 2016 research articles and then determine the number of citations that published work received in 2017. The ratio is the researcher’s own personal IF for 2017. This author IF would provide a clearer view of the citation impact of a given researcher’s work. There is no need to rely on JIFs. I&EC Research is in its second century of excellence, and our new JIF shows that we are doing well as a broad-based chemical engineering and applied chemistry journal. Publishing in I&EC Research gives authors exposure across the disciplines represented in modern chemical engineering research, thanks to the wide readership and global visibility of ACS Publications. Our editorial team is truly global, and we remain the largest and most-cited general-interest chemical engineering journal in the world. In addition, we have the shortest time to publication and rapid times to first decision. As always, we welcome manuscripts describing your best research. Phillip E. Savage, Editor-in-Chief The Pennsylvania State University, United States
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THE JIF IS FIELD DEPENDENT Different research fields have different funding bases, which leads to more publications and citations being produced in some fields and fewer in others. For example, the average impact factor for journals in molecular and cell biology is more than twice that of the average JIF in physics, which, in turn, is nearly thrice that of the average JIF in control theory. The average JIF for chemistry journals is more than twice that of the average JIF for chemical engineering journals.4 Field dependence is one of the reasons that JIFs must be used with care.
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ORCID
Phillip E. Savage: 0000-0002-7902-3744 Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
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THE JIF IS NOT A PROXY FOR THE QUALITY OR SIGNIFICANCE OF AN INDIVIDUAL ARTICLE The presumption that having an article published in a “highimpact” journal means that the article is also “high impact” is a logical fallacy. Berg’s modeling nicely disproves this notion. Again, the JIF is a journal-level metric, not an article-level metric.
REFERENCES
(1) Berg, J. JIFfy Pop. Science 2016, 353 (6299), 523. (2) San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment: Putting science into the assessment of research. Available via the Internet at: http:// www.ascb.org/files/SFDeclarationFINAL.pdf. (3) Casadevall, A.; Bertuzzi, S.; Buchmeier, M. J.; Davis, R. J.; Drake, H.; Fang, F. C.; Gilbert, J.; Goldman, B. M.; Imperiale, M. J.; Matsumura, P.; McAdam, A. J.; Pasetti, M. F.; Sandri-Goldin, R. M.; Silhavy, T.; Rice, L.; Young, J. H.; Shenk, T. ASM Journals Eliminate Impact Factor Information from Journal Websites. mSystems 2016, 1 (4), e00088-16.
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THE JIF IS NOT A PROXY FOR THE LIKELY CITEDNESS OF AN ARTICLE IN THAT JOURNAL In nearly every journal, a small fraction of the articles is responsible for the majority of the impact factor. 89% of the © XXXX American Chemical Society
AUTHOR INFORMATION
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.iecr.8b03046 Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX
Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research
Editorial
(4) Althouse, B. M.; West, J. D.; Bergstrom, T.; Bergstrom, C. T. Differences in Impact Factor Across Fields and Over Time. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 2009, 60, 27. (5) In praise of soft science. Nature 2005, 435, 1003. (6) Curry, S. Sick of Impact Factors. Available via the Internet at: http://occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2012/08/13/sick-of-impactfactors/. (7) Berg, J. Journal impact factorsFitting citation distribution curves. Available via the Internet at: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/ sciencehound/2016/08/04/journal-impact-factors-fitting-citationdistribution-curves/. (8) Kamat, P. V.; Schatz, G. C. Journal Impact Factor and the Real Impact of Your Paper. J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2015, 6 (15), 3074−3075. (9) Logan, B. E. Get Personal: The Author Impact Factor. Environ. Sci. Technol. Lett. 2018, 5, 1−2.
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EDITOR'S NOTE Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.iecr.8b03046 Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX
