Abstract
Making an impact: the Journal of Foot and Ankle Research.
Highlights
These criticisms relate primarily to: (i) the questionable assumption that citation rates are a valid measure of research impact or quality, (ii) the entirely arbitrary (and for some disciplines, very short) window of two years in which citations to a manuscript “count” toward the Impact Factor calculation, (iii) the skewed distribution of manuscript citations within a journal (i.e. very highly cited papers make a disproportionate contribution to a journal’s Impact Factor), and (iv) limitations in the coverage of journals in the Thomson ISI database, which has an English-language and US bias [8,9,10,11]
Impact Factors have been used to assess the output of researchers seeking academic promotion [5] and to guide research resource allocation [6], these broader applications of the Impact Factor in isolation are not recommended by Thomson Reuters, the company that owns the Impact Factor and publishes journal rankings through the Journal Citation Reports database [7]
These criticisms relate primarily to: (i) the questionable assumption that citation rates are a valid measure of research impact or quality, (ii) the entirely arbitrary window of two years in which citations to a manuscript “count” toward the Impact Factor calculation, (iii) the skewed distribution of manuscript citations within a journal, and (iv) limitations in the coverage of journals in the Thomson ISI database, which has an English-language and US bias [8,9,10,11]
Summary
These criticisms relate primarily to: (i) the questionable assumption that citation rates are a valid measure of research impact or quality, (ii) the entirely arbitrary (and for some disciplines, very short) window of two years in which citations to a manuscript “count” toward the Impact Factor calculation, (iii) the skewed distribution of manuscript citations within a journal (i.e. very highly cited papers make a disproportionate contribution to a journal’s Impact Factor), and (iv) limitations in the coverage of journals in the Thomson ISI database, which has an English-language and US bias [8,9,10,11]. Of the 14 English-language journals focused on foot and ankle research, only five are tracked by Thomson ISI (see Table 1), and JFAR’s Impact Factor is the highest in this group of journals.
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