Commentary: The power of the unrelenting impact factor—Is it a force for good or harm?

Abstract

Fifteen years ago many editors and academics had never heard of impact factors. Now they are obsessed with them. When I was first editor of the BMJ in 1991 I would attend the editorial boards of our dozen specialist journals—Gut and Thorax, for example—and present data on the journals’ impact factors. Usually nobody had heard of impact factors. I explained what they were—and people yawned. Now editors break open bottles of champagne if their impact factor rises by a tenth of a decimal point or burst into tears if it falls. They build their editorial strategies around increasing their impact factors. Authors, meanwhile, can quote the impact factors of the major journals and use them when deciding where to submit their papers. What is this thing called the impact factor? Why does it have such power? And is it a blessing or a curse? The impact factor was first mentioned by its inventor, Eugene Garfield, in Science in 1955. 1 He proposed that a system should be devised for an original scientific paper that ‘would provide a complete listing . . .of all the original articles that had referred to the article in question’. The law had been doing something similar since 1873. Garfield saw many uses for the citation index, but his prime aim was to ‘eliminate the uncritical citation of fraudulent, incomplete, or obsolete data by making it possible for the conscientious scholar to be aware of criticism of earlier papers’. He began his article with a quote that ‘The uncritical citation of disputed data . . . is a serious matter . . .Buried in scholarly journals, critical notes are increasingly likely to be overlooked with the passage of time, while the studies to which they pertain, having been reported more widely, are apt to be rediscovered.’ I find it ironic to read these words half a century after they were written because I fear that the impact factor that was born in this article has done little to reduce the citation of fraudulent data and may well have encouraged such citations. Several studies have shown that retracted articles continue to be cited. 2,3 One recent study of 211 retracted articles published between 1996 and 2000 found that a third of their citations occurred after the articles were retracted. 3 Of the 137 citations only five were negative: the vast majority cited the work affirmatively. To add to our distress a recent article in Science has shown that many studies that are proved to be fraudulent are not even retracted. 4