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Should Impact Factor be the standard for judging how sound a journal is?

Impact Factor is about citations and not necessarily quality 
Academia
4 Answers
Accepted, Highest Scores first Newest first
0
Gerald Zavorsky
Good question!

1. What Impact Factor measures—and what it doesn’t

  • Measures:
    The average number of citations in year X to articles published in years X–1 and X–2.

  • Doesn’t measure:

    • Article-level quality: There are many low-impact articles in high-IF journals—and vice versa.

    • Peer-review rigor: Citation counts don’t guarantee robust methods or reproducibility.

    • Long-term influence: Novel or niche findings may take years to accrue citations.

    • Subject‐area differences: Fields like mathematics or some clinical sciences inherently accumulate citations more slowly than, say, molecular biology.

2. Pitfalls of over-reliance on Impact Factor

  1. Citation gaming

    • Journals can inflate IF via editorials, review articles, or coercive citation policies.

  2. Skew by a few “blockbusters”

    • A handful of highly cited papers can drive up the mean, masking a long tail of rarely read articles.

  3. Disadvantages for specialized or emerging fields

    • New or interdisciplinary journals often start with a low IF despite high methodological rigor.

  4. Pressure on authors and reviewers

    • Chasing high-IF venues can incentivize “flashy” results over solid, reproducible science.

3. Alternative and complementary indicators

Metric / CriterionWhat it assessesArticle-level citations | Actual impact of your individual paper, regardless of journal.
Eigenfactor / Article Influence Score | Citation network analysis that down-weights self-citations.
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) | Considers both quantity and quality of citations over three years.
Peer-review transparency | Does the journal publish review histories or reviewer reports?
Data-and-methods availability | Does the journal mandate open data, code, and materials?
Acceptance rate & turnaround | Strikes a balance between speed and selectivity.
Editorial board expertise | Diversity and prominence of subject experts on the board.
Altmetrics | Early social and policy engagement (news, social media, policy).

4. A more holistic approach

  1. Assess your paper’s fit

    • Scope, audience, and novelty—rather than chasing a number.

  2. Examine journal practices

    • Look for clear research-integrity policies (e.g., COPE membership), open peer review, and reproducibility guidelines.

  3. Consider article-level impact

    • Track citations, downloads, and altmetrics for your individual work.

  4. Community perceptions

    • Ask trusted colleagues in your subfield: which journals reliably publish solid, reproducible science?

Bottom line

While Impact Factor can provide a rough sense of a journal’s visibility, it is too blunt and too easily manipulated to be the standard for scientific “soundness.” Instead, evaluate journals—and the papers they publish—through a combination of article-level metrics, transparency practices, peer-review rigour, and relevance to your field. That multi-pronged lens will serve you—and the broader scientific endeavor—far better than a single citation average.

1
Chong
No. Impact factor should be a guide but not a standard in judging the journal. You can have a very good paper submitted in low impact journal, and an mediocre in high impact impact journal. 
 
0
Bob Sonawane
The impact factor of a journal is one of the major considerations  about the  scientific  quality , value of  unbiased independent  nature  and it's  direct or potential  impact or magnitude to advance scientific knowledge based on  soundness findings. 
0
Maria Marta Facchinetti
In my opinion,  the impact factor (IF) should be used with caution when assesing the quality of a journal or the quality of an article, as it mostly reflects  the amount of citations the journal has rather than the quality of the article or the quality of the journal. In the case of journals that are open access (predatory journals are included), they obtain better IFs because the readers can download the articles easily and thus, they have more visualizations and more citations. Moreover, nowadays there are more open access journals than a few years ago. In my experience, prestigious journals that have not accepted the "open access only" policy are having reduced IF than others. Furthermore, the scientific comunity is helping the editorials make a lot of money.

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Created
06/25/2025
Answer Count
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Creator
Ndiokwelu Chibuzo