Nowadays, we have a wide debate regarding the systems of
assessment of research, researchers, projects, groups and, even, institutions. Among
the more frequents criticism there is the fact that the systems of assessment and
finance give a very high value to the measures derived from the impact factor (IF)
of the journals. The judgments to this discrimination indicator for article citations
of a journal in a determined period (
The impact factor
does not correct the problems derived from the citation distribution, that tend
to be biased in many ways, the sources of the cites are
highly diverse, and in a journal there are not only articles derived from research
or reviews. Nonetheless, this indicator only takes into account this type of publications,
what usually distorts it ( The impact factor
can be manipulated by editorial policies, for example, decreasing considerably the
number of articles, or, as editorial houses having platforms with hundreds of journals
do: they recommend or suggest articles on their platforms (this evidently can be
assessed as a service of the editorial emporiums to the researchers, though it clearly
bias the citations). A journal that publishes few articles per
year and receive a medium number of cites cannot be compared to one that
publishes a high number of articles per year. This aspect made them unequitable. This indicator contrasts
in a naive way journals with robust editorial infrastructures, with high financial
and technological resources, and decades of history of their positioning in communities,
with university journals that are barely trying to consolidate themselves. The impact factor
data are not always transparent and because of it the simulations that the editors
make, frequently had thrown results that are incomparable. The impact factor
does not compile cites that are in different knowledge products, that could inform about other
impacts.
Due to these reasons, diverse declarations have stated the need to even abolish from the assessment the measures of impact derived from the use of knowledge related to citations (
The assessment systems should take over the costs of international expert panels that contribute to this type of valuations, so that with a careful reading of the products and with quality criteria for research, impact, methodological rigor, theoretical scope, pertinence and potential of social impact, depending on the case; they allow to generate information more linked to quality than to the usage story and the characteristics of the indicators of global impact of the journals. These reviews should be transparent and be related to transformations: in the cultural practices of the academic communities, in the management of the institutions responsible for the assessment, and in the decisions about financing a research. What is clear, is that the practices that we currently have are creating, even, corrupt behaviors in the researchers communities as
Without any doubt, we have many dares to improve the processes of assessment of research and the researchers’ production; we should make strict critical analysis of them and create proposals to enhance it.