Suppression as a form of liberation? - Ross Mounce

"On Monday 29th June 2020, I learned from Retraction Watch that Clarivate, the for-profit proprietor of Journal Impact Factor ™ has newly “suppressed” 33 journals from their indexing service. The immediate consequence of this “suppression” is that these 33 journals do not get assigned an official Clarivate Journal Impact Factor ™ . Clarivate justify this action on the basis of “anomalous citation patterns” but without much further detail given for each of the journals other than the overall “% Self-cites” of the journal, and the effect of those self-cites on Clarivate’s citation-based ranking of journals (% Distortion of category rank)....

The zoology section of the Chilean Society of Biology has already petitioned Clarivate to unsuppress Zootaxa, to give it back its Journal Impact Factor ™ . I understand why they would do this but I would actually call for something quite different and more far-reaching.

I would encourage all systematists, taxonomists, zoologists, microbiologists, and biologists in general to see the real problem here: Clarivate, a for-profit analytics company, should never be so relied-upon by research evaluation committees to arbitrarily decide the value of a research output. Especially given that the Journal Impact Factor ™ is untransparent, irreproducible, and fundamentally statistically illiterate.

Thus to bring us back to my title. I wonder if Clarivate’s wacky “suppression” might actually be a pathway to liberation from the inappropriate stupidity of using Journal Impact Factor ™ to evaluate individual research outputs. Given we have all now witnessed just how brainless some of Clarivate’s decision making is, I would ask Clarivate to please “suppress” all journals thereby removing the harmful stupidity of Journal Impact Factor ™ from the lives of researchers."