Nefarious Numbers
The impact factor has been widely adopted as a proxy for journal quality. It is used by libraries to guide purchase and renewal decisions, by researchers deciding where to publish and what to read, by tenure and promotion committees laboring under the assumption that publication in a higher impact factor journal represents better work, and by editors and publishers as a means to evaluate and promote their journals. The impact factor for a journal in a given year is calculated by ISI (Thomson Reuters) as the average number of citations in that year to the articles the journal published in the preceding two years. It has been widely criticized on a variety of grounds,,,: