Death of the impact factor
Posted in Tips
There will probably always be a need for metrics like impact factor so that non-experts can estimate the significance of a scientist’s publications. These metrics are problematic, as we all know.
Interestingly, the relationship between an article’s citation rate and its journal’s impact factor is weakening. The saturation of the market by many specialty journals, along with their widespread online accessibility, has resulted in a lot of top papers going to smaller, low impact factor journals. This preprint has the details:
The weakening relationship between the Impact Factor and papers’ citations in the digital age
George A. Lozano, Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras
Will this trend continue?
(source, arXiv)