Podcast For Progress

What is the Journal Impact Factor? The Journal Impact Factor is widely used as a tool to evaluate studies, and researchers. It supposedly measures the quality of a journal by scoring how many citations an average article in this journal achieves. Committees making hiring and funding decisions use the 'JIF' as an approximation for the quality of the work a researcher has published, and in extension as an approximation for the capabilities of an applicant. Listen to the Full Conversation on Patreon! JIF as a measure of researcher merit I find this practice already highly questionable. First of all, it appears the formula calculates a statistical mean. However, no article can receive less than 0 citations, while there is no upper limit to citations. Most articles - across all journal - receive only very few citations, and only a few may receive a lot of citations. This means we have a 'skewed distribution' when we plot how many papers received how many citations. The statistical mean, however