Progress in Europe

摘要

I am pleased to be able to report to readers of the Journal that our impact factor for 2012 has been released and it is now 1.021, a small but significant increase on our 2010 and 2011 ratings. Many of you are familiar with my views on the impact factor and its uses and abuses, but while universities continue to use it (despite its shortcomings) to compare journals, papers and individuals, we shall need to work to maintain and ideally improve it. The impact factor is primarily a measure of the citations made to the papers in a journal in the two years prior to the quoted impact factor year, which does not necessarily relate to the quality of a paper. However, in the absence of anything better, universities have continued to use it as a marker of ability and excellence in research, in many cases without a full understanding of its limitations.