Why to disagree with the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment

Abstract

A recent editorial from Colombia Medica journal calls for a national agreement with the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, however, some good points presented in this declaration can end up in a bad recommendation, such as to not trust and to not use the impact factor! Although the number of journals and researchers that adhered since 2012 up to now to this initiative seems impressive (547 organizations and 12,055 researchers), these numbers reflect indeed that the vast majority of journals (≈27.000) and researchers do not agree. The impact factor is still widely used, perhaps because in our daily work as researchers we can compare articles from high and low impact factor journals and easily figure out that quality is very well correlated with this scienciometric measure. Despite there are undeniable occasional drawbacks, impact factor is still a reliable and reasonable measure of journal quality. Moreover, Thomson’s ISI no longer has the monopoly to calculate the impact factor and Scimago is now doing a good work that has gain it the trust of the scientific community.