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. 2019 Jul 31:8:e47338.
doi: 10.7554/eLife.47338.

Use of the Journal Impact Factor in academic review, promotion, and tenure evaluations

Erin C McKiernan #  1 , Lesley A Schimanski  2 , Carol Muñoz Nieves  2 , Lisa Matthias  3 , Meredith T Niles  4 , Juan P Alperin #  2   5
Affiliations

Use of the Journal Impact Factor in academic review, promotion, and tenure evaluations

Erin C McKiernan et al. Elife. .

Abstract

We analyzed how often and in what ways the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is currently used in review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) documents of a representative sample of universities from the United States and Canada. 40% of research-intensive institutions and 18% of master's institutions mentioned the JIF, or closely related terms. Of the institutions that mentioned the JIF, 87% supported its use in at least one of their RPT documents, 13% expressed caution about its use, and none heavily criticized it or prohibited its use. Furthermore, 63% of institutions that mentioned the JIF associated the metric with quality, 40% with impact, importance, or significance, and 20% with prestige, reputation, or status. We conclude that use of the JIF is encouraged in RPT evaluations, especially at research-intensive universities, and that there is work to be done to avoid the potential misuse of metrics like the JIF.

Keywords: academic careers; computational biology; higher education; impact factor; institutional policy; none; scholarly communications; systems biology.

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Conflict of interest statement

EM is a member of the DORA Steering Committee and an advisor for the Metrics Toolkit, both volunteer positions. LS, CM, LM, MN, JA No competing interests declared

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.. Grouping of terms related to the JIF.
Terms found in RPT documents were classified as either: (1) referring directly to the JIF (inner ring); (2) referring in some way to journal impact (middle ring); or (3) indirect but probable references to the JIF. For simplicity, singular versions of each term are shown, but searches included their plural equivalents. Our analysis is based only on those terms found in groups 1 and 2 (the two innermost rings).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Comment in

References

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