Impact factors are still widely used in academic evaluations
Survey finds that 40% of research-intensive universities mention the controversial metric in review documents — despite efforts to dampen its influence.
Almost half of research-intensive universities consider journal impact factors when deciding whom to promote, a survey of North American institutions has found.
About 40% of institutes with a strong focus on research mention impact factors in documents used in the review, promotion and tenure process, according to the analysis, which examined more than 800 documents across 129 institutions in the United States and Canada.
The data imply that many universities are evaluating the performance of their staff using a metric that has been widely criticized as a crude and misleading proxy for the quality of scientists’ work.
“It suggests that those organizations may not have properly thought through what they are looking for in their faculty,” says Elizabeth Gadd, a research-policy manager at Loughborough University, UK.
Measuring impact
The journal impact factor is a measure of the average number of citations that articles published in a specific journal have garnered over the previous two years. Publishers often promote the number in a bid to reflect the quality of a journal. But many academics and review panels and have turned to impact factors as a quick way of judging the quality, importance and reputation of a piece of research, or the scientist who published it.
This irks many academics, who say that impact factors propagate an unhealthy research culture that is detrimental to science, and who want universities to move away from using the metric in the hiring and promotion process. Studies have shown that the impact factor is not very good at predicting a scientist’s performance, but it is not known how often employers use the metric in this way.