Not so fast: Inflation in impact factors contributes to apparent improvements in journal quality

BioScience

Volumn 60, Issue 6, 2010, Pages 455-459

  Neff, Bryan D ^a   Olden, Julian D ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO   (Canada)

^b UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

Author keywords

Ecology; Impact factor; Inflation; Journal quality; Merit

Indexed keywords

EID: 77953483120     PISSN: 00063568     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/bio.2010.60.6.9     Document Type: Article

References (21)

1. Adam D. 2002. The counting house. Nature 415: 726-729.
2. Agrawal AA. 2005. Corruption of journal impact factors. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 20: 157.
3. Antelman K. 2004. Do open access articles have a greater research impact? College and Research Libraries 65: 372-382.
4. Althouse BM, West JD, Bergstrom T, Bergstrom CT. 2009. Differences in impact factor across fields and over time. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60: 27-34.
5. Barro RJ. 1997. Macroeconomics. MIT Press.
6. Bergstrom CT. 2007. Eigenfactor: Measuring the value and prestige of scholarly journals. College and Research Libraries News 68. (25 March 2010; www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/crlnews/backissues2007/ may07/eigenfactor.cfm)
7. Biglu MH. 2008. The influence of references per paper in the SCI to impact factors and the Matthew effect. Scientometrics 74: 453-470.
8. Davis PM, Lewenstein BV, Simon DH, Booth JG, Connolly MJL. 2008. Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: Randomized controlled trail. British Medical Journal 337: a568. doi:10.1136/bmj.a568
9. Eysenbach G. 2006. Citation advantage of open access articles. PLoS Biology 4: e157. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0040157
10. Frazier K. 2001. The librarians' dilemma: Contemplating the costs of the "big deal." D-Lib Magazine 7. (25 March 2010; www.dlib.org/dlib/ march01/frazier/03frazier.html)
11. Garfield E. 1955. Citation indices for science: A new dimension in documentation through association of ideas. Science 122: 108-111.
12. Hirsch JE. 2005. An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102: 16569-16572.
13. Kokko H, Sutherland J. 1999. What do impact factors tell us? Trends in Ecology and Evolution 14: 382-384.
14. Ogden TL, Bartley DL. 2008. The ups and downs of journal impact factors. Annals of Occupational Hygiene 52: 73-82.
15. Olden JD. 2007. How do ecological journals stack up? Ranking of scientific quality according to the h index. Écoscience 14: 370-376.
16. Seglen PO. 1997. Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research. British Medical Journal 314: 498-502.
17. Smith R. 2006. Commentary: The power of the unrelenting impact factor\- is it a force for good or harm? International Journal of Epidemiology 35: 1129-1130.
18. Statzner B. 1995. Scale effects on impact factors of scientific journals: Ecology compared to other fields. Oikos 72: 440-443.
19. Statzner B, Resh VH, Kobzina NG. 1995. Low impact factors of ecology journals\-don't worry. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 10: 220.
20. Todd PA, et al. 2007. Citing practices in ecology: Can we believe our own words? Oikos 116: 1599-1601.
21. Wilson AE. 2007. Journal impact factors are inflated. BioScience 57: 550-551.