Impact Factors

Although the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is widely acknowledged to be a poor indicator of the quality of individual papers, it is used routinely to evaluate research and researchers. If you want to know whether a paper is good, why not just read it?

Even the number of citations to an individual paper is suspect, since nonreplicable publications are cited more than replicable ones.

Let's face it: in the Internet era scientists should all publish in open journals that offer open online peer review that is not anonymous. Journals should all be published online at little or no cost. This would save libraries incredible amounts of money on subscriptions and the government plenty of money in grants. Perception of journals is all wrong. All too often thousands of dollars in page charges end up in the hands of online publishers who offer a product that is fundamentally no different than another website that offers the same product at 1% of the cost or even less. And worse yet, research that the public paid for is hidden from the public for months or even years while it travels from “high impact journal” to “high profile journal”, being modified along the way by anonymous people ("reviewers") who were not present when the work was performed. Does that sound like sound quality management or cGxP practice? The only really important thing a journal should do is provide timely publication and indexing in a widely utilized open index, like Google Scholar, PubMed, BioRxiv or ArXiv. Peer reviews should be published along with the articles as other scientists post comments and sign them, so that the quality of the review can be judged along with the quality of the article. (See To Sign or Not to Sign: A Slice of Transparency in Peer Review in PLoS.)