Open Access News

Outside academe, few people have even heard of [impact factors]. Mr. [Eugene] Garfield, though, now compares his brainchild to nuclear energy: a force that can help society but can unleash mayhem when it is misused. Indeed, impact factors have assumed so much power, especially in the past five years, that they are starting to control the scientific enterprise. In Europe, Asia, and, increasingly, the United States, Mr. Garfield's tool can play a crucial role in hiring, tenure decisions, and the awarding of grants. "The impact factor may be a pox upon the land because of the abuse of that number," says Robert H. Austin, a professor of physics at Princeton University. Impact-factor fever is spreading, threatening to skew the course of scientific research, say critics. Investigators are now more likely to chase after fashionable topics — the kind that get into high-impact journals — than to follow important avenues that may not be the flavor of the year, says Yu-Li Wang, a professor of physiology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. "It influences a lot of people's research direction." That influence has also led to a creeping sense of cynicism about the business of science publications. Journal editors have learned how to manipulate the system, sometimes through legitimate editorial choices and other times through deceptive practices that artificially inflate their own rankings. Several ecology journals, for example, routinely ask authors to add citations to previous articles from that same journal, a policy that pushes up its impact factor. Authors who have received such requests say that the practice veers toward extortion and represents a violation of scientific ethics. What's more, investigations into impact factors have revealed problems with the basic data used by ISI, the company that tabulates citation statistics and journals' impact factors. Started by Mr. Garfield in Philadelphia, ISI was bought in 1992 by the Thomson Corporation, which has tried to transform the citation enterprise into a more profitable operation by buying up databases and promoting its products. With alarming frequency, editors are finding fault with the impact factors that Thomson has issued....Mr. Garfield and ISI routinely point out the problems of using impact factors for individual papers or people. "That is something we have wrestled with quite a bit here," says Jim Pringle, vice president for development at Thomson Scientific, the division that oversees ISI. "It is a fallacy to think you can say anything about the citation pattern of an article from the citation pattern of a journal." Such warnings have not helped.

(PS: Monastersky's article doesn't touch on the overlap between IF issues and OA issues. Insofar as funding agencies and university hiring and promotion committees use IFs, they deter publication in journals with low IFs and journals with no IFs at all. Since it takes at least two years for a journal to have an IF, these practices deter publishing in any new journal, regardless of the reasons why it is new --whether it is exploring a new research niche, new metholodology, or new business model. Since most OA journals are new, these practices deter publishing in OA journals, even OA journals that might be higher in quality and impact than conventional journals in the same field.)

On Wednesday, October 12, at 1:00 pm Eastern Time, the Chronicle will host a live colloquy on the issues raised by Monastersky's article.

Also see Monastersky's companion article in the same issue of the Chronicle, Impact Factors Run Into Competition. Excerpt:

The publisher Current Science Group started an online service three years ago called the Faculty of 1000, which uses a stable of hand-picked specialists to rate new biology papers. A group of about 2,000 scientists evaluates the most important papers they read each month, from some 800 journals, says Vitek Tracz, chairman of Current Science Group, who started the project. The experts assess a paper and give it a numerical rating, which is used to calculate a Faculty of 1000 factor. Unlike impact factors, the Faculty of 1000 factor "is calculated from a value judgment given by identified experts," says Mr. Tracz, "and the reason for their value judgment can be traced." "We know from Faculty of 1000 that there are many important papers that get published in journals with low impact factors," he says....Mr. Tracz's other enterprise, a group of more than 100 open-access journals published by BioMed Central, recently developed another rating model. Last month the company's Web site started labeling papers "highly accessed" if they receive a large number of hits — a distinction that will always apply to the paper and hence could be placed on a CV. Clinicians seeking to stay on top of medical developments can participate in a new service run by McMaster University, in Ontario, called the McMaster Online Rating of Evidence, or MORE. The system comprises 2,100 practicing doctors, who rate articles on the basis of relevance and newsworthiness. If a paper gets a sufficient number of top ratings, MORE sends out an e-mail message about the study to readers who have signed up for news in that particular discipline. The system reaches more than 200,000 people. Among the newest rankings to appear is the h-index. Jorge E. Hirsch, a professor of physics at the University of California at San Diego, devised this method to quantify individual scientists' output by determining the highest number of papers each researcher has published that receive the same number of citations.

(PS: Monastersky didn't mention one promising initiative that's still under development: the Open Access Citation Index. More later.)