The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), see our most recent blogpost, focuses on the Journal Impact Factor, published in the Web of Science by Thomson Reuters. It is a strong plea to base research assessments of individual researchers, research groups and submitted grant proposals not on journal metrics but on article-based metrics combined with peer review. DORA cites a few scientometric studies to bolster this argument. So what is the evidence we have about the JIF?

In the 1990s, the Norwegian researcher Per Seglen, based at our sister institute the Institute for Studies in Higher Education and Research (NIFU) in Oslo and a number of CWTS researchers (in particular Henk Moed and Thed van Leeuwen) developed a systematic critique of the JIF, its validity as well as the way it is calculated (Moed & Van Leeuwen, 1996; Moed & Leeuwen, 1995; Seglen, 1997). This line of research…