Abstract
Journal impact factor (JIF) is among the most frequently used bibliometric indicators in scientific-scholarly journal and research assessment. This paper addresses the question as to why this indicator has become so attractive and pervasive. It defends the position that the most effective way to reduce the role of citation based journal metrics in journal and research assessment is developing indicators of the quality of journals’ manuscript peer review process, based on an analysis of this process itself, as reflected in the written communication between authors, referees and journal editors in electronic submission systems This approach combines computational linguistic tools from the domain of ‘digital humanities’ with ‘classical humanistic’ text analysis and a profound knowledge of the manuscript peer review and the publication process.
Highlights
Securing a political basis for academic research is a principal concern and a joint responsibility of national political domain and the academic research community
The journal impact factors (JIFs), a citation-per-article indicator, calculated at a level of a scientific journal, was developed by Eugene Garfield with the purpose of assessing a journal’s information utility and correcting for the size of its annual volume and was used as a tool to monitor the coverage of his Science Citation Index (Garfield, 1972)
I defend the position that the most effective way to reduce the role of citation-based journal metrics in journal and research assessment is the development of indicators of the quality of journals’ manuscript peer review process, based on an analysis of this process itself, rather than on proxies, such as citation-based measures or manuscript rejection rates
Summary
Securing a political basis for academic research is a principal concern and a joint responsibility of (supra) national political domain and the academic research community. In the assessment of research performance of individuals, groups, and institutions, JIFs are considered useful because users assume that they give an indication of the quality of a journal’s peer review process Their base assumptions are, first, that publishing in journals with a rigorous manuscript peer review process is a valid quality marker and, second, that the best available indicator of the quality of this process is a measure based on citation impact. More direct indicators of the manuscript peer review process are urgently needed because, nowadays, JIFs seem to have pervaded the entire scientific publication process They are used in librarians’ or researchers’ assessment of journals and in journal editorial management and in setting targets in contracts between publishers and journal editors-in-chief. This is perhaps a main explaining factor of their pervasiveness
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