Getting off the impact factor: an antidote

Articles published in high Impact factor (IF) journals receive higher visibility and attached prestige, regardless of their actual scientific merit. This results in unfair gain in subsequent number of citations to these articles, which also further increases the journals’ IFs. While there is a gradual move in assessment of researchers from IFs towards individual performance metrics, such as the h-index, those metrics are calculated on the basis of citation counts, and hence are still affected by the described phenomena. Naturally, this leads to increased submission and rejection rates in high IF journals, considerably delaying publication of manuscripts and wasting researchers’ time. Additionally, an article’s visibility increases with time, as it accumulates citations, thus severely disadvantaging new articles and early-career researchers. Here I propose a simple method for evaluation of individual articles and researchers that compensates for the effects of the journal IF and article age. In essence, the number of citations to an article is divided by the median number of citations to the articles published in the same journal in the same year. This ratio indicates the performance of an article relative to its closest competitors, is free from journal and age bias, and thus reflects an article’s scientific merit. An author’s (or institution’s) index is calculated as the sum of these article scores. Widespread adoption of this index, especially by decision-making authorities, will refocus scientists from besieging elitist journals to actually doing research.