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  • COMMENT

Rethinking impact factors: better ways to judge a journal

We need a broader, more-transparent suite of metrics to improve science publishing, say Paul Wouters, colleagues and co-signatories.
  1. Paul Wouters

    1. Paul Wouters is professor of scientometrics and dean of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at Leiden University, the Netherlands.

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  2. Cassidy R. Sugimoto

    1. Cassidy R. Sugimoto is associate professor of informatics at Indiana University Bloomington, USA.

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  3. Vincent Larivière

    1. Vincent Larivière is associate professor of information science at the University of Montreal, Canada.

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  4. Marie E. McVeigh

    1. Marie E. McVeigh is head of editorial integrity at the Institute for Scientific Information, part of the Web of Science group, Clarivate Analytics, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

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  5. Bernd Pulverer

    1. Bernd Pulverer is chief editor of The EMBO Journal and head of scientific publications at EMBO, Heidelberg, Germany.

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  6. Sarah de Rijcke

    1. Sarah de Rijcke is professor of science and evaluation studies and director at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands.

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  7. Ludo Waltman

    1. Ludo Waltman is professor of quantitative science studies and deputy director at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands.

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Illustration by David Parkins

Global efforts are afoot to create a constructive role for journal metrics in scholarly publishing and to displace the dominance of impact factors in the assessment of research. To this end, a group of bibliometric and evaluation specialists, scientists, publishers, scientific societies and research-analytics providers are working to hammer out a broader suite of journal indicators, and other ways to judge a journal’s qualities. It is a challenging task: our interests vary and often conflict, and change requires a concerted effort across publishing, academia, funding agencies, policymakers and providers of bibliometric data.

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Nature 569, 621-623 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01643-3

A list of co-signatories accompanies this Comment (see Supplementary information).

References

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Supplementary Information

  1. Supplementary list of co-signatories-1

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