By Elizabeth Gibney
The Wellcome Trust and the Higher Education Funding Council for England are among the bodies calling for the use of the journal impact factor in funding, appointment and promotion decisions to be scrapped. The metric - which ranks journals by the average number of citations their articles attract in a set period, usually the preceding two years - has become “an obsession in world science”, says a coalition of academics, editors, publishers and research funders, in a declaration published on 16 May. “The Journal Impact Factor was developed to help librarians make subscription decisions, but it’s become a proxy for the quality of research,” said Stefano Bertuzzi, executive director of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). “The ‘high-impact’ obsession is warping our scientific judgement, damaging careers, and wasting time and valuable work.”
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