Editorial In medio stat virtus: some thoughts about journal Impact Factor

Journal editors are constantly seeking to improve the excellence of their journals. One of the main endeavors of an editor is to attract the attention of the scientific community and thus increase the number of manuscript submissions and quality of papers. A journal’s Impact Factor is currently the most widely employed tool to express a journal’s quality. Problems in the calculation of this index and its misuse, however, have caused several academic consequences. A group of high-impact journal editors and publishers of scholarly journals convened a discussion group during the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in December 2012 in San Francisco to address this issue. Further discussions of this group led to the publication of a manifesto in May 2013 known as The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, which recognizes noteworthy limitations of the Impact Factor. The concept of Impact Factor was introduced by Gross & Gross (1927) who argued that the most frequently cited journals are the most relevant to the field and thus the most valuable journals for a library to purchase. For that reason, they suggested counting references as a measure to rank the use of scientific journals. In 1955, Eugene Garfield first mentioned the idea of an impact factor (Garfield, 1955), although the term “impact factor ” itself was introduced later by Garfield & Sher (1963). In 1960, Garfield founded the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and initiated the Science Citation Index in 1963. Over time, the ISI absorbed the Social Sciences Citation Index and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index. As a consequence of these bibliographic databases, Journal Citation Reports (JCR) was launched in 1975, which contained the Impact Factor for each journal indexed by the ISI. In 1992, Garfield sold the ISI to Thomson Scientific for a substantial amount of money (USD $210 million). Thomson Scientific currently publishes JCR annually. In 2005, Thomson Scientific began Web of Science, which integrated all of the Thomson Scientific databases. In 2007, Thomson Scientific merged with Reuters to become one of the primary cooperatives for scientifi