impact factor

What’s Next for Impact Factors?

 By: Steven Inchcoombe, Chief Publishing Officer at Springer Nature The announcement of the latest Journal Impact Factors has prompted the expected heated discussion around their value, importance and relevance to authors, funders and the rest of academia. Despite all of these challenges and reservations, the Impact Factor is still noted by authors as one of the top elements they take into account when deciding which journal to submit their work to, and this got me thinking about the criticism publishers face for referring to Impact Factors when talking about the performance of their journals and making comparisons. I recently had … Read more…

Researching the Value of the Impact Factor

Impact factors were released this week. The impact factor has long been a measure of a journal’s research output, but in recent years there have many attempts to find alternative ways to expand how research is assessed. This excerpt from Diversity, value and limitations of the journal impact factor and alternative metrics in Rheumatology International explores some of the many other measurements available today.  Over the past decades, there have been many attempts to overcome limitations of the popular JIF and to propose new citation metrics bearing more comprehensive information on citable sources and their scientific value. The latter has become … Read more…