Beyond journal impact factors?

Abstract

Editorial CELL COMMUNICATION AND SIGNALING, which is published since August 2008 as the official journal of the Signal Transduction Society http://www.sigtrans.de has recently been included in the impact factor tracking system of Thomson Reuters ISI. For a relatively new enterprise like ours, this appears to be an important step towards establishing ourselves in the realm of serious scientific journals. Nowadays, many scientists will simply not publish in a journal that does not have an impact factor. There are multiple reasons for this. One is that many universities have started to distribute funds according to formulas that are directly linked to the number of publications a researcher produces and the impact factors of the publishing journals. Therefore, getting a paper into a certain journal and publishing two short papers rather than one longer one (with the same data) can have a major impact on the financial viability of a research group or department. Whether this increasing dependency of researchers on journal impact factors has a positive impact on the speed and quality of their research and of the resulting publications, i.e. their public visibility and the actual output of data and whether it is beneficial to science and society in general, is at least somewhat doubtful, as I shall detail further below. It has become a way of life for many researchers to create, for each emerging manuscript, a list of possibly suitable journals, which are ranked strictly according to their impact factors. Submission of the manuscript then starts at the top of the list. Quite often even the authors know that the chances for acceptance of their work in this top-tier journal are minimal, but nevertheless ‘one might get very lucky’, or ‘one might at least get a foot in the door’ (i.e. a chance to resubmit after a very major revision), or ‘one might get good suggestions for further experiments from the reviewers’, or... In reality, however, this strategy almost always leads to multiple rejections in a row, while numerous hours are spent on reviewing, reformatting and rewriting the manuscript, leading to a substantial loss in productive research time for both authors and reviewers. A second reason for the prominent role of journal impact factors is that they are used in an ever-growing number of career-deciding evaluations by review boards of funding agencies, recruitment committees, university governing bodies, external advisory panels, governmental research assessments etc. Especially researchers in the early stages of their career tend to greatly depend on the outcomes of these evaluations. Of course, with an everincreasing number of evaluations taking place, the commission/committee members neither have the time nor, in some cases, the qualifications, to read and digest all relevant publications properly. Instead, they are more and more tempted to simply look at journal impact factors as a quick, if inappropriate, substitute for a proper review. In addition, the inflated dependency on journal impact factors and hence the need for manuscript acceptance in a specific journal can have detrimental consequences for scientists that are purely driven by commercial interests. As one colleague told me not too long ago, it took him nearly three times as long to get the manuscript into its final, formally-correct shape after the scientific review was completed than it took him to generate the data in the first place. At the end he ‘was ready to strangle the editor with his bare hands’ since the editor seemed to have no interest in the actual work and only wanted the formal regulations like word number and figure size limits of the journal to be strictly met. This may have just been an inexperienced editor, but the same can happen if costly print journals are under pressure to maximise their profits, and it is not helping scientists and society at all. When asked why he put up with this, my colleague’s answer was, not surprisingly, ‘I need the journal’s impact factor for my next application’. Along the same lines, figures that are cropped to a degree that makes it impossible to judge data quality, or that are composed of a dozen down-scaled and now stamp-sized pictures that have lost much of their initial high resolution, are not an uncommon phenomenon these days, even in high impact print journals. It may be fun to joke about this in a lab’s journal club, but it does not advance science. Correspondence: stephan.feller@imm.ox.ac.uk Editor in Chief Feller Cell Communication and Signaling 2010, 8:4 http://www.biosignaling.com/content/8/1/4