A measure of change
Some journals, such as those published by the Royal Society and EMBO Press, already publicize citation distribution. Curry and his fellow authors explictly recommend that other publishers play down their impact factors, and, instead, emphasize citation distribution curves such as those that his team generated, because they provide a more informative snapshot of a journal’s standing. The preprint includes step-by-step instructions for journals to calculate their own distributions.
A spokesperson for Nature says that the journal will soon update its websites “to cover a broader range of metrics”, and a representative of Science has stated that the journal will consider the proposal once the preprint article is published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Ludo Waltman, a bibliometrics researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands, says that citation distributions are more relevant than impact factors for high-stakes decisions, such as hiring and promotion. But he is wary of doing away with impact factors entirely; they can be useful for researchers who are trying to decide which among a pile of papers to read, for instance.
“Denying the value of impact factors in this situation essentially means that we deny the value of the entire journal publishing system and of all the work done by journal editors and peer reviewers to carry out quality control,” Waltman says. “To me, this doesn’t make sense.”
Anti-impact-factor crusaders say that it will take time to diminish the influence of the figure, let alone exile it. “This is a cultural thing,” says Bertuzzi, “and it takes pressure from multiple points to change behaviour”.