Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2019 Jul 31:8:e47338.
doi: 10.7554/eLife.47338.

Use of the Journal Impact Factor in academic review, promotion, and tenure evaluations

Erin C McKiernan #  1 , Lesley A Schimanski  2 , Carol Muñoz Nieves  2 , Lisa Matthias  3 , Meredith T Niles  4 , Juan P Alperin #  2   5
Affiliations

Use of the Journal Impact Factor in academic review, promotion, and tenure evaluations

Erin C McKiernan et al. Elife. .

Abstract

We analyzed how often and in what ways the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is currently used in review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) documents of a representative sample of universities from the United States and Canada. 40% of research-intensive institutions and 18% of master's institutions mentioned the JIF, or closely related terms. Of the institutions that mentioned the JIF, 87% supported its use in at least one of their RPT documents, 13% expressed caution about its use, and none heavily criticized it or prohibited its use. Furthermore, 63% of institutions that mentioned the JIF associated the metric with quality, 40% with impact, importance, or significance, and 20% with prestige, reputation, or status. We conclude that use of the JIF is encouraged in RPT evaluations, especially at research-intensive universities, and that there is work to be done to avoid the potential misuse of metrics like the JIF.

Keywords: academic careers; computational biology; higher education; impact factor; institutional policy; none; scholarly communications; systems biology.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

EM is a member of the DORA Steering Committee and an advisor for the Metrics Toolkit, both volunteer positions. LS, CM, LM, MN, JA No competing interests declared

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.. Grouping of terms related to the JIF.
Terms found in RPT documents were classified as either: (1) referring directly to the JIF (inner ring); (2) referring in some way to journal impact (middle ring); or (3) indirect but probable references to the JIF. For simplicity, singular versions of each term are shown, but searches included their plural equivalents. Our analysis is based only on those terms found in groups 1 and 2 (the two innermost rings).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Comment in

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Alperin J, Muñoz Nieves C, Schimanski L, McKiernan E, Niles M. 2018. Terms and concepts found in tenure and promotion guidelines from the US and Canada. Harvard Dataverse. - DOI
    1. Alperin JP, Muñoz Nieves C, Schimanski LA, Fischman GE, Niles MT, McKiernan EC. How significant are the public dimensions of faculty work in review, promotion and tenure documents? eLife. 2019;8:e42254. doi: 10.7554/eLife.42254. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Archambault É, Larivière V. History of the journal impact factor: Contingencies and consequences. Scientometrics. 2009;79:635–649. doi: 10.1007/s11192-007-2036-x. - DOI
    1. Association of College & Research Libraries Scholarly communication toolkit evaluating journals. [October 1, 2018];2018 https://acrl.libguides.com/scholcomm/toolkit/evaluating
    1. Barbui C, Cipriani A, Malvini L, Tansella M. Validity of the impact factor of journals as a measure of randomized controlled trial quality. The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. 2006;67:37–40. doi: 10.4088/JCP.v67n0106. - DOI - PubMed

Publication types