Wrong Number: A closer look at Impact Factors | quantixed

"This is a long post about Journal Impact Factors. Thanks to Stephen Curry for encouraging me to post this ... I can actually remember the first time I realised that the JIF was a spurious metric. This was in 2003, after reading a letter to Nature from David Colquhoun who plotted out the distribution of citations to a sample of papers in Nature. Up until that point, I hadn’t appreciated how skewed these data are. We put it up on the lab wall ... Now, the JIF for a given year is calculated as follows:  A JIF for 2013 is worked out by counting the total number of 2013 cites to articles in that journal that were published in 2011 and 2012. This number is divided by the number of “citable items” in that journal in 2011 and 2012.  There are numerous problems with this calculation that I don’t have time to go into here. If we just set these aside for the moment, the JIF is still used widely today and not for the purpose it was originally intended. Eugene Garfield, created the metric to provide librarians with a simple way to prioritise subscriptions to Journals that carried the most-cited scientific papers. The JIF is used (wrongly) in some institutions in the criteria for hiring, promotion and firing. This is because of the common misconception that the JIF is a proxy for the quality of a paper in that journal. Use of metrics in this manner is opposed by the SF-DORA and I would encourage anyone that hasn’t already done so, to pledge their support for this excellent initiative ... With the citation distribution in mind, why do Thomson-Reuters calculate the mean rather than the median for the JIF? It makes no sense at all. If you didn’t quite understand why from the @statfact tweet above, then look at this ..."