The journal impact factor: navigating between Scylla and Charybdis.

摘要

In 1955, Eugene Garfield conceived the idea and developed an index to measure the quality of scientific journals. He expected that the index would be used constructively. However, he recognized that, in the wrong hands, it might be abused or misused, as it has frequently happened in science for many other breaking discoveries (e.g., nuclear power) (1). Despite this, the impact factor (IF) soon became widely accepted among the editorial staffs of scientific journals as the gold standard for assessing the quality of scientific publications and journal prestige. The IF has inspired several imitations, but it still remains the best we have.