Smoke, Mirrors and Impact Factor: How Management Scholars Undermine a Managerial Metric

Abstract

We analyze leading management journals of the Academy of Management (AMJ;AMR;AMLE;AMP;AMD as well as JOM), collecting and analyzing information on the managerial research assessment tool of impact factor (IF) during two time periods – 1997-2005 and 2006-2019. We capture the changing nature of journal strategies, examining number of references, self-citation, and citation cartel performance. Our study shows that one outcome of the recent focus on IF metrics is a general increase in the number of references used, resulting in a corresponding IF gain not predicated on academic merit. In essence, editors and authors are responding to the growing importance of IF by ‘gaming’ the system thus undermining the impact of institutional attempts to measure academic research performance.