以下模拟案例为虚构情节，如有雷同，纯属巧合。
Case scenario
Mr. Li is a Research Assistant pursuing a PhD in Cancer Research from Beijing University College of Medicine, Beijing, China. He has just completed a three-year study in which he has successfully identified a novel oncogenic factor. His research advisor, Dr. Zhang, Professor & Head, Department of Oncology, believes that Mr. Li’s research findings are ground-breaking and has asked him to ensure that his paper gets published in a prestigious international journal. Successful publication would imply a large monetary bonus for Mr. Li, a promotion for Dr. Zhang, a considerable upward shift in their department’s ranking at the university, and a boost to the university’s standing in the country and worldwide.
This is Mr. Li’s first paper, and he isn’t sure how to go about identifying a suitable influential journal. He is in a hurry, as his pioneering research findings will have maximum relevance only if disseminated quickly. He finds that his colleagues and supervisors have published in a wide array of journals, most of them Chinese. His research online does not help him narrow down his search. He finds numerous journals whose scopes seem to match the content of his research paper, but attains little clarity on the relative merit of each journal.
After a prolonged and fruitless quest for the best target journal, Mr. Li seeks the advice of the university librarian, Ms. Wu. She directs him to the most recent release of Journal Citation Reports? and explains how he can interpret it: Journals are listed by discipline and in order of impact factor. He can select from among the high-impact-factor journals in his field of study. Ms. Wu goes on to elaborate on how the impact factor is considered a very useful tool for students to identify influential journals within a specific discipline.
The report helps Mr. Li shortlist a few journals that most closely meet his publication requirements. In a few months, his paper is published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Comment
The impact factor (IF), from Journal Citation Reports? (a product of Thomson Reuters), is an easy-to-understand, statistically accurate, objective tool that can be used to critically evaluate the quality of journals. It is a ratio calculated per journal per year. The 2011 IF of Journal A would be calculated as follows:
The IF has many valuable uses. It helps journals and publishers see where they stand and assists researchers and librarians in managing subscriptions. Most notably, as in the case described above, it provides a starting point for young researchers and first-time authors to identify target journals best suited to their research. This is particularly important in the backdrop of the publish-or-perish paradigm. In the absence of such a clearly defined quantitative metric as the IF, new researchers would be daunted by the sheer number of relevant publications available and would not know where to start their journal selection.
At the same time, it is important to consider the following points when using this metric to compare and assess journals:
The IF should not be used to compare journals across disciplines. For example, even the best journals in mathematics tend to have low IFs, whereas molecular biology journals have high IFs, owing to the variance in citation patterns across disciplines.
The IF varies depending on the article types within a journal. Review articles are generally cited more often than other types of articles because the former present a compilation of all earlier research. Thus, journals that publish review articles tend to have a higher IF.
The IF does not measure the quality/credibility of individual articles/authors. Since the IF is calculated based on the number of citations to a journal rather than to individual articles within the journal, not all articles in a high-IF journal may have contributed to the journal’s IF. Accordingly, it may be inappropriate to base a researcher’s career advancement prospects on the IF of journals in which he/she has published papers.
To overcome the limitations of the IF, several alternative metrics have been proposed and are being explored as options to evaluate journal quality. However, none of these have yet acquired the wide acceptance that the IF holds. The IF is a long-standing, reliable, objective metric for the evaluation of journals. Provided that it is used appropriately, with due consideration of its limitations, it undoubtedly remains the most well-understood and widely accepted indicator of journal quality and can be an especially useful point of reference for budding scientists.