Exhibition Prohibition — Why Shouldn’t Publishers Celebrate an Improved Impact Factor? | The Scholarly Kitchen

"Recently, it seems some keepers of the zeitgeist are suggesting that publishers should avoid promoting their impact factors. From the Declaration on Research Asssessment (DORA) to certain voices in academia, various monitors of journal etiquette believe editors, journals, and publishers that promote their impact factors are in some way participating in a ruse or are doing something illegitimate. Some new journals, notably eLife, have publicly pledged not to promote their impact factors. Such self-imposed restrictions seem akin to putting your head in the sand — a form of avoiding reality, which for journals includes being measured by things like the impact factor, circulation size, editorial reputation, turnaround times, peer review standards, disclosure rules, and more. For me, journals wanting to promote their impact factors have no reason to apologize and are actually serving the academic community by making their impact factors known and easily obtained. After all, the impact factor is a journal metric. It is not an author metric or an article metric, but a journal metric. It simply states an average number of citations per scholarly article over the past two years. So, if a journal has an impact factor of 10, that means that, on average (with some disputes around the edges over what’s included and what’s counted), articles in that journal received 10 citations. Just because some in academia can’t stop misusing it doesn’t change the fact that it’s entirely appropriate for a journal to use this measure ..."