Abstract
Universities and funders in many countries have been using Journal Impact Factor (JIF) as an indicator for research and grant assessment despite its controversial nature as a statistical representation of scientific quality. This study investigates how the changes of JIF over the years can affect its role in research evaluation and science management by using JIF data from annual Journal Citation Reports (JCR) to illustrate the changes. The descriptive statistics find out an increase in the median JIF for the top 50 journals in the JCR, from 29.300 in 2017 to 33.162 in 2019. Moreover, on average, elite journal families have up to 27 journals in the top 50. In the group of journals with a JIF of lower than 1, the proportion has shrunk by 14.53% in the 2015–2019 period. The findings suggest a potential ‘JIF bubble period’ that science policymaker, university, public fund managers, and other stakeholders should pay more attention to JIF as a criterion for quality assessment to ensure more efficient science management.
Highlights
Over the past few years, academia has debated about the use of journal metrics in evaluating scientific quality with many criticisms directed toward the most widely used Journal Impact Factor (JIF) provided by Web of Science
The study types of data: a) JIFs provided by yearly Journal suggests 60% of the institutions equated JIF with Citations Reports (JCR) from Clarivate Analytics; quality, while 40% mentioned it with impact, and b) Counts of journals in the predefined JIF ranges
The results have shown signs of a “JIF bubble period,” which can be found in the rise of the median JIF from 2017 to 2019, or the increase of the JIF limit for categorizing the top percentage of journals
Summary
Over the past few years, academia has debated about the use (and misuse) of journal metrics in evaluating scientific quality with many criticisms directed toward the most widely used Journal Impact Factor (JIF) provided by Web of Science. Science Citation Index (SCI) and Journal Impact Factor (JIF) had gradually become useful tools for librarians, editors, and policymakers to evaluate important journals in the fields and identify a potential rise of a research topic (McKiernan, Schimanski, Muñoz Nieves, Matthias, Niles, & Alperin, 2019). Managers at universities, research institutions, and science funding agencies have been using JIF as an important criterion for evaluation in many aspects including research quality (Moustafa, 2015), career promotion and grant application (McKiernan et al, 2019), prediction of scientific impact (Berenbaum, 2019), or even distribution of funding (Moustafa, 2015). A paper studying over 860 review, promotion, and tenure documents from universities in the United States and
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