Impact Factor as Tenure Criterion: Flawed?
Dear Friends of Women in Science,
I met Eugene Garfield, who founded ISI, at a Council on Undergraduate Research conference, and I have always liked the idea of actually knowing how much a paper was cited by others.
As you probably know, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) now ranks journals by how heavily they are cited in general, and puts out a list of journals ranked by impact factor. The NIH newsletter to which I subscribe (womeninscience@NIH.gov) recently highlighted a study of whether or not using such journal rankings in tenure cases could disadvantage women.
The question was evaluated by Pete Hegarty and Zoe Walton and published in Perspectives on Psychological Science. They analyzed data from nine high-impact psychology journals. In their study, the journal's impact factor was only slightly correlated with the citation rate for individual articles, which is also available through ISI. Interestingly, the presence of a male author as either the primary author or the senior author was correlated with journal impact factors. However, the actual citation rates of these papers were not well correlated with the impact factors.
The social science journals showed a more male-biased trend towards male enrichment in high impact journals than natural science psychology journals, and the female authors published more by proportion in the social science oriented journals. Thus they could be disadvantaged if the journal impact factor were used to rate their publications.
Since each article can be checked for its citations, it seems clear that it is fairer to do that rather than to simply judge the publications by the journal impact factors.
cheers,
Laura
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Hi Marian,
I am glad to hear that you have landed where you are judged fairly, instead of by criteria that may be mis-applied. We all want to have our work appraised with both fairness and appreciation, but it's hard to find setting where that can occur!
best,
Laura
Dear Phoebe,
Yes, thank you for the molecular biology publication barriers. Women are found in many studies not to "negotiate" but I guess I learned early to argue persistently about paper rejectsions. I'm sure I don't sound as bombastic as some of my male colleagues, who have been known to call names when a reviewer disagrees with their own ideas, but I have been comfortable with pointing out where the reviewers missed important parts of the data or made wrong assumptions. I think of it as postdoc training, since my mentors usually had their postdocs read the papers and suggest comments, and then tended to rubber stamp them.
And Science and Nature do seem to have rules that favor old boy networking big time.
cheers,
Laura
Hi Suzanne,
The points you make are important. I think the big problem with impact factors is that they are easy but they are too global to be meaningful in making individual tenure/promotion decisions. You've given us yet another reason why they don't make sense in your research area, and a very poignant one. I am glad to hear that you include the ideas and concerns of people with intellectual disabilities.
cheers,
Laura
Laura,
Reading these comments reminds me of one of the reasons I am glad I am not an academic. (There aren't very many of them; I often wish I were at a college.) I like the method of recognition in the commercial world, where I see my customers using what I have created and people consider my work directly when evaluating my worth. I don't have to rely on citations, papers published, etc.
Cheers!
Marian
We do know several things about molecular biology papers that will promote gender bias at high impact journals.
1. Studies show that men are more apt to argue than women if a manuscript has been rejected, and they often succeed in getting it published.
2. In the very high impact journals like Nature and Science, male scientists with name recognition have an easier time getting a paper published than female scientists with less prestige. And the editors tend to select referees proposed by the author, who are usually the author's friends.
phoebe
I have concerns generally about impact factors, as they relate just to a measure of a form of collectability rather than the actual real-world impact a paper has on its target. As long as credibility can be (however tenuously) linked to papers one cites in one's own paper, there will always be pressure to cite high profile authors and so the merry go round is off and running in a self perpetuating cycle.
The exclusion of actual impact - the use to which a piece of research is put - and the translation of material into publicly accessible output means that no value is placed on service user views (for clinically relevant work) or public opinion. For my research, public involvement in the design, running, and delivery of research is a crucial part of the application for funding. To then aim for journals that are inaccessible to most people seems hypocritical and closed-minded. My research group has a number of members with intellectual disabilities. We value their input. They are unable to read high impact journals. They want to see the work in a widely read publication where people who might use it are likely to read it. That would be high impact, for them.
Hi Laura,
I think Beth is right, there's no way to know if these findings apply to other fields unless someone does a more complete study. I wish they would. It would be worth doing all the work to look up 30 articles for their citations if you knew of data like this in your field.
ARC
Hello Laura,
I think these results are quite interesting, but I am not sure they apply to molecular biology journals since those weren't studied. Someone ought to do this for the journals I publish in. We DO use impact factor as you're saying might be harmful. I have decided to look up the citations of women's papers in case the impact factor under represents their influence, when we do women's tenure cases from now on.
BRC
