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As one of the oldest and most used metrics for evaluating the impact of scholarly journals, the journal impact factor has a number of different advantages when it comes to evaluating the impact, importance and significance of a scholarly journal one may wish to publish their work in. These advantages include, but are not limited to, how well known the journal impact factor is, how easy it is to calculate and how it accounts for journals of different sizes and ages.

Renown

• Has been in use since 1950
• Well-established and well-respected measure of the importance and significance of a journal and its articles
• Other scholars will understand the prestige of being published in a journal with a high impact factor

Simplicity

• Simple calculation (journal's average number of per-article citations to articles published in that journal over the previous two years)

Equality

Main content area

Despite its popularity and widespread adoption, the journal impact factor has a number of disadvantages and flaws that scholars must be aware of, such as using self-citation to artificially boost the impact factor, publishing a large number of review articles and the "eigenlob" author self-citation phenomenon. 

Self Citation

• Some publishers may require their authors to reference articles already published in that journal, therefore bumping up its impact factor

• Some journal publishers may enter agreements with other publishers and require their authors to cite each other’s journals, therefore raising all of their impact factors

Review Articles

• Journals may publish a large number of review articles that quickly and efficiently inflate their impact factor, since review articles typically receive many more citations than original articles

• As a result, scholars who choose a journal to publish in based on its impact factor may be selling themselves short, since "60% of the top 25 journals, as ranked by the ISI impact factor, are journals publishing only reviews and summaries of past research" (Falagas & Vangelis 224)

Eigenlob Author Self-Citation Phenomenon

• In order to take advantage of how the journal impact factor is calculated, some journals may only accept authors who publish a lot of research, which includes citing their own work

• Journals may also prefer to publish papers that have many authors, as this increases the chance of self-citation and so increases that journal’s impact factor

Works Cited

• Falagas, Matthew E., and Vangelis G. Alexiou. "The Top-Ten in Journal Impact Factor Manipulation." Archivum Immunologiae et Therapiae Experimentalis 56.4 (2008): 223-6. Web.