Journal Impact Factor: it will go away soon

Like many other investigators who participate on editorial boards of various journals, I have witnessed the emergence of the so-called ‘‘Journal Impact Factor’’ over the last 10 years. The Impact Factor (IF) is a number derived by dividing the number of citations a journal receives over a period of time by the number of papers published. It is an average indicator of how frequently papers published in a particular journal are cited (1). At board meetings, the IF dominates discussions regarding the journal’s status and well-being. Much of the time spent at such meetings evolves around strategies on how to improve the IF using any means possible. People are looking at the numerator and are trying to maximize it using conventional wisdom or tricks, including finding high-impact/highquality papers or publishing items that usually receive more citations (e.g., reviews, special issues, etc.), or by minimizing the denominator by attempting to exclude from the calculation items such as letters to the editor, brief communications, etc., even though citations received for these are included in the numerator! In general, an IF of -2 is considered poor, a value between 3 and 5 is good and anything over five is excellent; breaking the barrier of 10 indicates outstanding success. Bottles of champagne are opened when the IF breaks certain barriers (e.g., 5 or 10). Much has been written already on the IF and its limitations, and it is not my intention to repeat such discussions. In general, it is well-known that the IF of journals is dependent primarily on a few very highly cited papers, in comparison to the bulk of papers published. But who would care about IFs? Publishers are very interested because they can market their journals