Journal Impact Factor (or pissing contest for academics)

 

The comic strip above from PhD comics is a very humorous take on impact factor (IF) (although I believe most of the items included in the equation are TRUE).

Elsevier has recently released new metrics for journal impact factor. Three new computations are being introduced as better methods of assessing the importance of the journals and published articles.

The three rankings are:

• SNIP - Source Normalized Impact per Paper
• SJR - SCImago Journal Rank
• IPP - Impact per Publication

Universities and funding agencies reward researchers who get published on Journals with very high impact factors, such as Cell, Nature, Science, Molecular Cell, Nature Genetics, Lancet. Getting published in any of these journals signals that you have arrived as a researcher, which of course translates to opportunities (grants, seats on prestigious committees or boards, consultancies).

Exactly because of the importance of impact factor (IF) that a lot of researchers have also looked at the way IF was being computed. The three ranking methodologies above are a move towards a more realistic assessment of the actual value of the journals and published articles.

My only complaint in all of this as a researcher is the absence of engineering journals at the top of the list. Based on SJR's website, the science journal with the highest SJR is Annual Review of Immunology (SJR = 30,095), for mechanical engineering it's International Journal of Plasticity (SJR = 3,675), for electrical and electronics engineering it's IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (SJR = 8,094).

When I have the time in the future, I would take a close look at the various ranking computation and try to figure out why engineering journals rank very low on the impact factor ladder.