einstein (São Paulo). 01/Oct/2016;14(4):vii-viii.

Einstein São Paulo: its metrics and some related issues

DOI: 10.1590/S1679-45082016ED3922

The impact factor (IF) is the main tool to evaluate a journal nowadays. When you suggest a journal to submit a paper, the first question one may consider is “What is its impact factor?”. Everywhere investigators are pushed to publish their articles on high IF journals. It is a perverse situation, because some journals, like Science or Nature, have a rejection rate greater than 95% and only accept the very important articles that will be highly cited, thus contributing to increase their IF. It is much more difficult for journals without an IF, or with a low IF, to get the index or increase it.

Garfield conceived the IF in 1955, when he published an article in Science suggesting how it should be calculated. His idea was discussed and the Science Citation Index was developed and published in 1964.⁽⁾ Thomson Reuters bought The Science Citation Index and publishes it today as the Journal Citation Report. The way this metrics is calculated is easy: all citations of all articles published in the past 2 years, or occurring in the coming year, in journals that are part of the Web of Science, are retrieved and divided by all articles published in the journal during those 2 years. This is the IF of the journal. However, getting an IF is not so easy; it does not matter if you are indexed on PubMed, or have published the peer-reviewed texts on time, for years. The journal must to be evaluated by Thomson Reuters reviewers, who have to agree that the publication deserves to be included in their collection. However, the criteria used for selection have not been always clear.

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