Impact of Impact Factor in quantifying the quality of scientific research

Abstract

The first science journal was published in 1662 by the Royal Society of London in the name Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Since then, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of scientific journals, particularly after Second World War, which reinstated the necessity of some scale to measure the standard of these journals. In 1927, the method of counting citations of the published articles to rank journals was introduced 1, which was later on improved as Science Citation Index (SCI) by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) 2. Funded by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, ISI undertook the citation indexing project for Genetics Study Section in 1961. The Genetic Citation Index covered 613 journals and indexed them based on three metrics namely, number of citations in 1 year, number of citations in 5 years and number of citations in 14 years 3. In 1963, the SCI included a new metric termed ‘Impact Factor’, which is still being used as a standard bibliometric indicator for identifying quality journals. Later on, SCI was renamed as Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and since 1975, it is being published annually, offering a systematic and objective means to evaluate the journals. The ISI was acquired by Thomson Corporation in 1992, which then took over Reuters in 2008 to form Thomson Reuters, and publishes JCR in two editions, viz. science and social science. The JCR Science Edition contains data from over 8,000 journals in 171 subject categories whereas the Social Sciences Edition covers more than 2,900 journals in 55 subject categories