Open Access News

After [John B. West] submitted a paper on the design of the human lung to the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, an editor emailed him that the paper was basically fine. There was just one thing: Dr. West should cite more studies that had appeared in the respiratory journal...."I was appalled," says Dr. West of the request. "This was a clear abuse of the system because they were trying to rig their impact factor."...

[T]here is mounting concern that attempts to manipulate impact factors are harming scientific research....

Impact factors matter to publishers’ bottom lines because librarians rely on them to make purchasing decisions. Annual subscriptions to some journals can cost upwards of $10,000. The result, says Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, which publishes 14 journals, is that "we have become whores to the impact factor." He adds that his society doesn’t engage in these practices.

Journals can manipulate impact factors with legitimate editorial decisions. One strategy is to publish many review articles, says Vicki Cohn, managing editor of Mary Ann Liebert Inc....Since it is easier for scientists to cite one review than the dozens of studies that it summarizes, reviews get a lot of citations, raising a journal’s impact score....

Journals also can resort to "best-of" features, such as running annual summaries of their most notable papers. When Artificial Organs did this in 2005, all 145 citations were to other Artificial Organs papers....Self-citation can go too far. In 2005, Thomson Scientific dropped the World Journal of Gastroenterology from its rankings because 85% of the citations it published were to its own papers and because few other journals cited it. Editors of the journal, which is based in Beijing, did not answer emails requesting comment.

Journals can limit citations to papers published by competitors, keeping the rivals’ impact factors down. An analysis of citations in the Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare shows very few citations of papers in a competitor, Telemedicine and e-Health, "while we cited them liberally," says editor Rashid Bashshur, director of telemedicine at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor....

Scientists and publishers worry that the cult of the impact factor is skewing the direction of research. One concern, says Mary Ann Liebert, president and chief executive of her publishing company, is that scientists may jump on research bandwagons, because journals prefer popular, mainstream topics, and eschew less-popular approaches for fear that only a lesser-tier journal will take their papers. When scientists are discouraged from pursuing unpopular ideas, finding the correct explanation of a phenomenon or a disease takes longer....As examples of that, Ms. Liebert cites early research on AIDS, gene therapy and psychopharmacology, all of which had trouble finding homes in established journals. "How much that relates to impact factor is hard to know," she says. "But editors and publishers both know that papers related to cutting-edge and perhaps obscure research are not going to be highly cited."...

Comment. What's the OA connection? A journal isn't even eligible for an impact factor until it's two years old, and even then Thomson Scientific is very selective about the journals it selects for tracking. Because most OA journals are new, most don't have impact factors --though the ones that do have them are very competitive as Thomson itself has shown in two studies (one, two). The culture of chasing the impact factor therefore deters authors from publishing in most OA journals. Note that it also deters authors from publishing in any new journals, whether they are new because they're trying a new business model or new because they're exploring a new methodology or topic. For the same reason, it deters the launch of new journals. The impact factor does much more to entrench existing journals than to support much-needed change.

If the impact factor were an accurate measure of quality, then we might have to live with this problem. But in fact, it's a measure of impact (or more precisely, a mixture of real and illusory impact) that is systematically misused as a measure of quality. If this isn't already clear, I can add two problems to the good list Begley provided in her article. (1) When an article is cited to criticize it for error or fraud, the citation still boosts the journal's impact factor. (2) Impact factors measure the average citation impact of a whole journal but are often used to judge the impact (or worse, the quality) of an individual article or author when we have no idea whether they brought the average up rather than down.

One of the most effective steps we could take to help the cause of OA (and the cause of good science) is to get promotion and tenure committees to look for signs of true quality rather than settle for this crude surrogate.