Technology and Innovation Has Made Impact Factor Redundant—Better Alternatives Are Here to Thrive

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FI22121111-1 Purvish M. Parikh

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Three recent publications have let the cat out of the bag. They are “Stop Congratulating Colleagues for Publishing in High Impact-Factor Journals,” “Who are the real parasite publishers and journals? What prevents all medical data from being open access in real time?” and “Against Parasite Publishers: Making Journals Free.”123

For long impact factor (IF) has ruled the academic publishing world. It has expanded its sphere of influence on career progress, appointments in academic institutions, promotion reviews, and grant applications. IF is popular since 1975 and is based on the number of citations that the journal received in the previous 2 years. For instance, if our article is published in the year 2022, the IF that the journal in which our article is published will be decided on the citations received by the journal in the years 2020 and 2021. Authors are cognizant of the significance of IF because journals with higher IF are considered as respectable, their review process is supposed to be selective, there is greater scrutiny of articles submitted, and if published, the authors are considered worthy by their peers. Publications in journals with high IF also cascade into wider publicity through reporting by science journals and social media. They also have a higher chance of being included in reports on new publications. As the definition suggests, there is also a higher chance of being cited by other scientists working in the field.

However, IF has a very important flaw. All the metrics are related to the journal. There is no evaluation of the individual publication or the author who has done the research work. Therefore, having a publication in a high IF journal does not guarantee that your work will be cited. In fact, more than two-thirds of publications in such journals have fewer citations than the IF of the journal.4

By experience, we have found that using the right keywords does wonders to online access. When the research work is great, those interested in the subject can easily find it on the net. Searchable databases such as Scopus, Google Scholar, and Web of Science make this possible.

There are also niche areas in science and medicine, where journals with high IF simply do not exist. The research communities in such fields are small and usually know each other well. So, they tend to find work of colleagues online even if published in journals with IF of 3 or 4.

As journals with high IF are in “great demand,” their review process is time consuming and ultimately most of the work submitted does not get accepted. In the process, our data may become redundant in today's exponentially progressive research environment. Can we afford to face this?

The final stumbling block is that if such journals are open access, they command a high premium in terms of publication “processing fees.” For instance, last year, Nature announced a princely sum of Euro 9,500 as their charges if the authors wanted their article to have open access. Clearly, this is an elitist attitude where rich publishing houses want to get richer at the cost of dissemination of information. This has a major health care implication. Work from low- and medium-income countries (LMIC) will not be published in such journals. Or the work will be behind a paywall that the LMIC colleagues cannot surmount.5

No wonder global citation inequality is increasing. Data between 2000 and 2015 encompassing 1 million authors and 26 million scientific publications show interesting confirmation of the same.6 Citations have increased from 14 to 21% only for the tip 1% of most cited researchers. The increasing trend was most prominent in the Netherland, Denmark, Australia, and United Kingdom. Interestingly, it showed a decline in the United States and China.

IF has actually become so frustrating and misleading that many grant providers have started ignoring any reference to it. The European Research Council has taken a step further by banning mention of journal IF from all grant proposals and bids submitted to them.7

So, the question that begs an answer is, what are the alternative metrics that we can use and which of them is the most likely to replace IF?

SCImago Journal and Country Rank, Eigenfactor Metrics, and Science Gateway need mention only to say that they exist but pale in comparison to IF.

In 2005, Hirsch published another metric to evaluate the scientific research output of individual scientists and researchers.8 This was labeled as the H index factor. It is based on two data points. One is the number of journal articles the author has published. The other is the number of citations received by those articles (of the same author). An example from publications from one of us shows that number of total citations as 12,103 and the H index as 34, as calculated using Google Scholar.9 Let us take another example. Charles Darwin died in the year 1882, but his legacy is still very much alive. His publications have received at least 77,539 citations giving him an H index of 80. There are several videos available on YouTube that can provide greater details about the H index factor.10

Google is extremely innovative. And Google Scholar came up with a great and simple metric. Their i10-index simply looks at the number of publications of the author that has at least 10 citations.11 This is free and easy to use. It also specifically gauges the productivity of individual researchers. The only flaw is that no differential weightage is given based on the sequence of authorship.

Web of Science citation tool uses searches from many databases and citation indexes. They allow free membership and can display the citations and H index in graphic form. Advantage is that it separates out the self-citation. Another useful tool is what they call Beamplot Summary, which shows the author citations through time—recent versus older versus earliest. This showcases impact of junior scientists using a graphic visualization tool.12

PLos article-level metrics is different because it allows evaluation of articles before they accrue citations, adds social metrics, and also shows how the influence of the published work changes over time. These advantages would make it invaluable, but for the fact that most access is behind a paywall called “premium products.”13

“Publish or Perish” is the name of an app that searches and retrieves academic citations and analyzes them.14 They want us to believe that it is the equivalent of the holy grail, allowing scientists to decide which journals to select for publication, preparing for a job interviews, conducting literature review, do homework before promotion interviews, etc. Unfortunately, it does not live up to the hype.

Author disambiguation has become really critical because social media has exploded with easy access and tons of data being added every second. When authors share names, it becomes imperative to separate the work of one from that of the other. Sophisticated tools have been developed to do this automatically based on affiliation, e-mail, designation, area of interest, etc.15 Unfortunately, it needs improvement. Thankfully scientists can contribute themselves to being attributed corrected. For instance, ORCID and Web of Science ID help researchers identify their work and not be confused for someone else.16

Indian Citation Index is the name of an India portal that has also jumped into the foray.17 Online bibliographic database from academic journals. When we checked last, it covered 1,100+ journals from India from 2004 onward. It includes full-text articles from open access journals too. It was launched in India in 2009 by Diva Enterprises Pvt. Ltd. Being a private enterprise, access is not free. When we tried to sign up, we were given the generous time of 2 hours of complementary access!

In summary, the citation metrics and indices can be divided into three broad categories: those which are general purpose subscription based, those that are general purpose free online, and those which are subject specific.

Publication is vital and a high stake factor for academics.18 This is like a shadow that follows us right from the first conference abstract acceptance to the final philosophical pearls of wisdom that seniors share with their juniors and colleagues. Since the early 1980s, this has gained increasing importance and now dictates navigating the academic pathway. Technology evolution and importance of social media have changed the landscape. We now seem to have a say in how our work gets disseminated. We also have the opportunity to control the pace and width that our work reaches, at least to some extent.19 This helps us in the path toward optimizing online reputation and no longer be at the mercy of complex evaluation metric systems controlled by a select few. In fact, conferences are now rewarding those delegates that instantly post live comments about research—as it is being presented. Welcome to the new academic digital world.