Brace for impact
Heidi Siegel, a spokesperson for London-based business-analytics firm Thomson Reuters, the major publisher of the JIF, says that the measure is a broad-brush indicator of a journal’s output — and should not be used as a proxy for the quality of any single paper or its authors. “We believe it is important to have a measure of the impact of the journal as a whole, and this is what the JIF does,” says Siegel.
But many scientists, funders and journals do not use it that way, notes Stephen Curry, a structural biologist at Imperial College London who is lead author on the bioRxiv preprint paper. Many researchers evaluate papers by the impact factor of the journals in which they appear, he worries, and impact factor can also influence decisions made by university hiring committees and funding agencies.