It’s Time to Terminate Social Work’s Relationship with the Impact Factor | Social Work | Oxford Academic

"As a journal-level metric, the IF is unable to assess the value of any given article or author. To make this inference, one would need to read the article and assess its claims, scientific rigor, methodological soundness, and broader implications. What’s more, the IF (which represents the average number of citations across a finite set of eligible articles) is vulnerable to the skewness in citation rates among articles (Nature, 2005) and to the manipulation, negotiation, and gaming of its calculation among stakeholders (Ioannidis & Thombs, 2019). At a more fundamental level the IF does not capture journal functioning such as improvements to (or worsening of) internal evaluative processes (e.g., effectiveness of peer review, changes to submission instructions and policies, use and adherence to reporting guidelines, etc.; Dunleavy, 2022). These and other issues are explored in more depth by Seglen (1997)....

In light of these limitations, social work should de-emphasize the IF and instead embrace a new set of evaluative tools. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (American Society for Cell Biology, 2013)—and more recently the Leiden Manifesto (Hicks et al., 2015)—typify such efforts. They encourage stakeholders (i.e., academic institutions, journals, funders, researchers) to consider using a multitude of qualitative and quantitative alternative metrics (i.e., “altmetrics”; Priem et al., 2012; see also https://metrics-toolkit.org/metrics/) when judging scholarly output—whether it be a journal article, a grant proposal, or even a hiring or tenure packet. ..."