Abstract
During the past decade “impact factor” emerged from the shadows of “bibliometrics” and began exerting a powerful effect on academics, journals, and institutions. The impact factor of a journal for any given year is the number of citations received by articles published in that journal during the two preceding years, divided by the total number of articles published in that journal. It was developed in the 1960s by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) to determine the influence of a publication over history. Thomson Reuters bought ISI in 1992 and the use of impact factor as a criterion for evaluating journals began growing exponentially in 1995.
The current obsession with impact factor exemplifies the misuse of simple, and potentially useful, measurements as a powerful bureaucratic mechanism of control. There are many objective problems with the use of impact factor as a simple “grade” for evaluating the quality of a journal. Nevertheless, universities, publishers, foundations, and governments around the world now use it to rank and reward faculty, journals, departments, and entire institutions. I first felt the impact of impact factor when my college required me to revise my CV so and cite the impact factor of every journal in which I published. And I am surely not alone.
At a recent meeting of the Associate Editorial Board of Action Research Journal (ARJ), raising impact factor became an explicit and central strategic goal for the first time. The issue of impact factor, however, reflects a dilemma built into our very raison d’etre. One of our main missions is to provide a high-quality, recognized, peer-review publishing outlet that enables action researchers to flourish in academic institutions. This mission means conforming to establishment quality criteria and standards while remaining true to the participative, change-oriented values of action research. Thus, we need to engage with impact factor while at the same time challenging its misuse as part of the academic status quo we wish to change.
There are no easy answers to this dilemma. My goal is to stimulate a discussion within the action research community about impact factor, its impact on us, and how we—editors of this journal, our contributors, and our readers—can act in ways that enable us to work it through. The good news is that we are not alone. We have mainstream allies in this struggle. A recent article in Nature reported that leading academic societies and publications are advocating an end to the measure as currently (mis)used. Nature has spoken out strongly and consistently against the pernicious effects of impact factor as a simplistic measure of academic quality and strongly advocates alternatives. It would be naïve, however, to assume that impact factor, or the misuse of measurements as tools of control, will simply disappear.
So what can we do? On the side of improving ARJ’s impact factor, the most common advice seems to be to simply improve journal quality while placing a particular emphasis on the choice of keywords, the mix of articles (reviews tend to be cited more frequently), and the strategic use of special issues to attract wider audiences. At the same time, we need to avoid the temptation to game the system and other ethical violations such as requiring authors to cite papers from the journal in order to get published.
On the side of challenging impact factor, the first step is to educate ourselves and others about meaning of impact factor, its use and abuse. Indeed, one of the reasons I wrote this editorial was to educate myself. Rather than simply conforming to the demands of the system, we need to make impact factor discussable. We should engage our colleagues and our institutional leadership in conversations about it. We should also use the tools of action research to critically inquire into the effects of impact factor and how they can be changed. In doing so, we need to expose its abuse while positively engaging questions of quality and how we can assess it—for action research in particular and research in general. The following references are a good place to start.