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fork(2) [soylentnews.org] writes:

      If you live in academia or high-level research, the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) may be either your friend or foe. JIFs are a measure of the average number of citations that a journal's articles receive over some historical period (usually two years). Their purpose was originally to give an indication of the quality of journals. but they are also often used to assess the quality of individual papers or the researchers that author them.

      Nature [nature.com] reports on a concerted effort to move away from this controversial metric.

Now, a paper posted to the preprint server bioRxiv1 on 5 July, authored by senior employees at several leading science publishers (including Nature's owner, SpringerNature), calls on journals to downplay the figure in favour of a metric that captures the range of citations that a journal's articles attract.

      And in an editorial that will appear on 11 July in eight of its journals, the American Society for Microbiology in Washington DC will announce plans to remove the impact factor from its journals and website, as well as from marketing and advertising.

      "To me, what's essential is to purge the conversation of the impact factor," says ASM chief executive Stefano Bertuzzi, a prominent critic of the metric. "We want to make it so tacky that people will be embarrassed just to mention it."

      Bertuzzi was formerly the executive director of the American Society for Cell Biology, which banned the mention of impact factors from its annual meeting.

      The bioRxiv preprint is available here [biorxiv.org].

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