BioMed Central and SpringerOpen sign the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment

In 1999 BioMed Central made high quality research open to anyone who wanted to access and could use it. By making open access sustainable, we changed the world of academic publishing. A core part of our role has always been to distribute, and communicate the research we publish beyond its original audience. We want our authors’ research to be as widely read, cited, and talked about as possible; and therefore, we have a real interest in how academia measures the impact of research. The Impact Factor (IF) is the traditional, and most widely used method for gauging the quality of journals. In use since 1975, the IF is far older than BMC. A journal’s Impact Factor is determined by dividing the number of citations published in a given year, to citable articles published in that journal during the preceding two years. The attraction of the IF is its supposed simplicity; many conclude that the higher the number, the ‘better the journal.’ If used properly, in context, there should be no problem with using a journal’s IF, and many academics find the IF a very useful tool, especially when wading through the thousands of journals available and trying to decide where to submit. The problem emerges when the IF is used improperly or over-enthusiastically. Inappropriately, judgements about academic CVs are often based on Impact Factors rather than the quality of the published research itself, and publishing in journals with the right Impact Factor can positively affect the resu...
Source: BioMed Central Blog - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs