Authors: Pei Kuan Lai, Sivalingam Nalliah, Cheong Lieng Teng, Nicole Lee Ping Chen.
ABSTRACT
The impact factor (IF) of a journal, first proposed by Garfield has evolved over the years as an evaluation tool for comparing scholarly journals. Over the past few decades, the utilization of IF has extended beyond the tool for acquisition of journals in libraries and proxy for quality and importance of published journals. Nowadays, IF has been widely used as a surrogate for article quality, assessment of individual researcher’s achievement, criteria to secure tenure and job promotion, as well as evaluation tool for the application of research grant or funding. This review addresses the historical perspective of IF and its evolution, the controversial issues leading to the manipulation by journal editors or authors, and followed by some of the interventions to overcome the manipulations and controversies. IF itself has many drawbacks and shortcomings worth addressing as they will lead to bias as a citation index. The scientific community should pay attention to call for a better citation metric which will prove to be an improved yardstick of science. This paper also covers on other citation metrics and their emerging usages as parameter for evaluation of scientific publication quality.
Keywords: Impact factor, bibliometry, citation metrics.
Citation: IeJSME 2019 13(2): 4-11
