Fighting the impact factor, one CV at a time

The impact factor is probably one of the most loved and hated bibliographic indicators in the scientific community. It is a simple number, really. It reflects the number of citations of recent papers a journal has published in a year, averaged over the last two years. Eugene Garfield created it in 1975 to rank journals and provide a way for librarians to decide which journals to subscribe to. It is an indicator to assess the relative importance and readerships of journals. What it does not do is assess the relative quality of the work of an individual scientist. If anything, the impact factor of the journal in which you publish is an indication of past research published in that journal, not your own.

Excellent papers are published in specialist journals that have a modest impact factor only because the topics they publish on are not read by a broad audience.

Some suggestions for what you can do as a researcher.