Bureaucrats, researchers, editors, and the impact factor - a vicious circle that is detrimental to science

The impact factor, a measure of the ''mean citedness'' of articles in a scientific journal, is a tool for the comparison of journals that was used only by a few bibliometricians.In recent years however, the impact factor has become a popular instrument for research evaluation.Bureaucrats in universities and research agencies use it as a surrogate for the actual citation count to measure the scientific production of researchers and research groups.][3][4] Along with other researchers, 1-10 Eugene Garfield, 11 the man who came up with the impact factor, has considered the procedure to be inadequate.The European Association of Scientific Editors 12 officially recommends that journal impact factors should not ''be used for the assessment of single papers, and certainly not for the assessment of researchers or research programs, either directly or as a surrogate''.2][3][4] The following illustrates the weakness of the impact factor as a measure of science and shows that it actually has a negative impact on science.A journal's impact factor for a specific year is defined as a quotient.The numerator consists of the number of times a journal's articles from the two preceding years were cited in articles from more than 9,000 journals during the specific year.The denominator counts the ''citable'' articles published in the journal in the two preceding years.In general, ''citable'' articles are ''original contributions'' and ''review articles'', but this item is a main point of debate, which has been discussed below.Out of 38 million items cited between 1900 and 2005, Eugene Garfield 13 reported that only 0.5% were cited more than 200 times, and about half of the items were not cited at all.Citations of articles in any specific journal are very heterogeneous, which produces a highly skewed histogram.Different models for this distribution have been suggested.Models have been based on power laws, stretched exponential fitting, and the non-extensive thermostatistical Tsallis formalism.