The impact factor for evaluating scientists: the good, the bad and the ugly.

摘要

In two papers recently appearing in this journal and in the accompanying editorial, Eleftherios P. Diaman-dis, Emmanuel J. Favaloro and Mario Plebani highlighted the strengths and caveats on the use of the widespread marker of scientific output, the impact factor (IF) (1-3). In particular, the article by Emmanuel Favaloro emphasized that the IF is increasingly (and misleadingly) being used to evaluate the scientific and academic value of scientists across a wide variety of disciplines. Such use of the IF is increasingly being disputed. It is now well recognized that the IF for a particular paper does not reflect the actual participation of each individual author in the research, nor does it identify the ability of each participant to conceive and design a study protocol, acquire, analyze and interpret data, or draft and critically revise manuscripts. Indeed, these "parameters" are not taken into account when generating IF values for evaluating the output of research teams and/or individual scientists.