Abstract
Recent years have witnessed decreased budgets for scientific research, and these developments sharpen the competition for publication space in high‐profile journals. The favorable (and coveted) perceptions that come with such publications bring a decided edge in the competitive arenas of grant funding and career advancements after all. But grave concerns are once again surfacing that this fixation is lending elite journals a distorted and unjustified influence on grant funding, on faculty recruitment, and on career advancement. Such distorted influence is damaging because it miscasts the larger body of impactful and quality science being produced. These concerns are spurring actions within the scientific community ranging from calls for improvements in how scientific research quality and output are evaluated by universities and funding agencies (e.g. DORA; am.ascb.org/dora/), to advocating boycott of elite journals [1], and to the launch of new open‐access journals such as eLife that advertise themselves as quality‐focused alternatives to Cell , Nature, and Science . How effective these measures will be only time will tell, but there is broad agreement that “impact factor” is an abused metric. Much of the problem with the present citation‐based impact factor formula lies with it being an absolute‐value function that ignores whether citations reference outstanding science, incorrect science, or worst of all, fraudulent publications. It would be an interesting (albeit also imperfect) exercise to re‐calculate journal impact factors after positive and negative signs are assigned to their most cited papers. However we may recoil from a formalized impact factor, the reality is that some manifestation of the impact factor concept is here to stay. This is inevitable so long as there are elite journals. Because the relentless march of scientific progress drives an exponential increase in scale of the scientific literature, discriminating journals evolve into elitist platforms in the face of …
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