Abstract
Motivation/Background: Publishing in highly rated journals has being the primary prerequisite for hiring, appraising and promoting academics in higher institutions since the beginning of the 21st century. Lecturers became concerned more with this than classroom activities. This paper seeks answers to the following questions: what is the nature of impact factor publishing? Is there any relationship between impact factor policy and the development of education and scholarship in Nigerian higher institutions?
 Methods: Qualitative data gathering, content analysis, and Conservative Theory of imperialism as framework of analysis were adopted.
 Results: The results reveal that impact factor is an ineffective index for academic evaluation, perpetuates academic and economic imperialism, and undermines the development of higher education and scholarship in Nigeria.
 Conclusions: The mechanisms of impact factor rating are entirely western and neo-colonial, while its application as measurement index for evaluation of lecturers negates the goal for which it was introduced. The relevance of this conclusion for higher education in Nigeria lies in its advocacy for policy reforms and the abrogation of orthodox impact factor policy. Thess supports the recommendations of some scholars for the re-introduction of orthodox classroom performance evaluation index that has been discarded for the policy.
Highlights
The need for the revival of academic research and the development of education in Africa led to many international conferences (NEPAD, 2006a & 2006b; Gray and Burke, 2008) whose primary focus were the development of research, creation of knowledge networks, and sharing knowledge in the midst of knowledge diversity through the networks to enhance public good or development (UNESCO, 2005; Altbach, Reisberg & Rumley, 2009)
Nigerian administrators and scholars trained in the Western world together with their Nigerian trained counterparts who adopt westernisation paradigm promote western models, schemes and templates through educational policies as a form of development orthodoxy
The paper seeks answers to the following questions: 1). what is the nature of impact factor publishing? 2) Is there any relationship between impact factor policy and the development of education and scholarship in Nigerian higher institutions?
Summary
The need for the revival of academic research and the development of education in Africa led to many international conferences (NEPAD, 2006a & 2006b; Gray and Burke, 2008) whose primary focus were the development of research, creation of knowledge networks, and sharing knowledge in the midst of knowledge diversity through the networks to enhance public good or development (UNESCO, 2005; Altbach, Reisberg & Rumley, 2009) These primary objectives stimulated the pursuit of using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for data gathering, processing, analysis, publication, transfer, and storage. Scholars from USA, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan author 84% of articles published in high ranking international journals while 163 other countries – mainly Third World countries – lay claims to only 2.5% (Chan & Costa, 2005; Willinsky, 2006) The advances of these Western Countries in ICTs provide the background and equip them to control research and educational development agenda across the world. One of the prominent policies in this category is the impact factor publication policy, which requires academics to publish their articles in highly rated journals known as impact factor journals, as a primary index for hiring and promotion
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