I don’t post much on this blog, but when I do, I’m like the bass drum in an orchestra — it doesn’t sound often, but when it does…

OK, the last entry of the day is about the lively debate between the Journal of Experimental Medicine and Thomson Scientific — the creators of the Impact Factors (IFs). Have you been following it? In a nutshell, last December the JEM published an Editorial thoroughly criticizing Thomson for their lack of transparency in the way they calculate IFs. Thomson wrote a long rebuttal, to which the JEM subsequently replied.

I find it somewhat amusing that the JEM has started this cruzade against IFs. First, IFs are subject to the same competition rules that affect any other product available to researchers. If the product is useless, you stop using it, the same way that you stop using an antibody that gives you a high background or a journal that publishes bad science. If IFs are still in the market and are still going strong, it’s because the alternatives aren’t as useful. Why would they want to change the way they do business unless there is pressure from the marketplace?

Second, some of the arguments the JEM uses to criticize the IFs strike me as equally amusing. For example, they suggest that the median, not the mean number of citations would be a more reliable indicator of a journal’s impact, and they wonder why IFs include citations to Review and News & Views articles instead of just focusing on primary research. As you can already imagine, if these changes were made, they would lead to a higher IF for the JEM. In fact, I once heard a talk from a member of the JEM staff in which the IFs of several journals (including mine) were recalculated using the median number of citations, taking out cites to Reviews and a couple other cosmetic fixes. Do I even need to tell you that the difference between the JEM and Nature Immunology or Nature Medicine wasn’t too large any more?

All of this is well and good but it seems to me that, if we’re not satisfied with the IFs, journals are not the right advocates for change, as we have a vested interest in having the highest impact for the communities we serve. In other words, it would be disingenuous for me to start advocating that citations to Reviews must stay in the calculation and suggest new things that will make my journal’s IF be higher. To my mind, the scientists should be the ones fighting this battle, assuming they care. Alas, I suspect the care more about figuring out what they need to do to publish in a journal with a high IF as opposed to trying to find a way to level the field across journals.

To me, the situation is quite simple. IFs will carry on being influential until something else outcompetes them in the marketplace. In the meantime, if you want a higher IF and Thomson counts citations to Reviews, then publish more Reviews. And if they choose the mean over the median, then try to publish articles that will give you a higher mean number of citations. Everything else is commentary.