Impact factor, commercial competition between Thomson Reuters and Elsevier, and economic crisis

The use of the impact factor has evolved and it has become the indicator to measure not only the quality of journals but also of authors and research groups, provoking strong reactions from publishers, researchers, librarians and evaluation committees. This paper presents a reflection about the relationship between strategies and business decisions of private companies (such as Elsevier and Thomson Reuters) and the Spanish system of evaluating scientific activity