Stung by years of criticism that its journal impact factors have distorted scholarly publishing, the private firm Clarivate Analytics based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, this week rolled out an updated version of its Journal Citation Reports database that it says provides context useful to understanding journals’ characteristics and audiences.
Impact factors—which represent the number of citations to a journal's articles divided by the number of articles published during a 2-year period—are widely used in academe as a yardstick of a journal’s prestige and reach. But the metric has plenty of critics. The rap includes worries that editors can too easily boost their journal’s ranking through a variety of strategies, and that impact factors are misleading—a few highly cited papers can drive much of a journal’s overall impact factor.
