ISI and impact factors

Posted on January 23, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized |

Published impact factors affect authors’ decisions about manuscript submission, funding awards, and promotion and tenure. While  critiques of the use of impact factors are common, this report by the editors of the Journal of Cell Biology and the Journal of Experimental Medicine is the first to raise serious questions about the underlying validity of the data used to calculate impact factors and therefore the accurracy of the metrics that are published

Mike Rossner, Heather Van Epps, and Emma Hill reported on their inability to verify published impact factors using data provided provided by ISI.    In their report, they note that they were unable to replicate published impact factors for their own and other journals,  found numerous and serious errors in several data sets provided by ISI, and call into question the validity of both ISI’s dataset and their published impact factors.  

The editorial by Mike Rossner, Heather Van Epps, and Emma Hill was published in the Journal of Cell Biology and is available at http://www.jcb.org/cgi/content/full/179/6/1091 

–Beth McNeil (with content from Karla Hahn, ARL)

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