Last month we explained how impact factors are calculated. This month we will examine how impact factors are used for different purposes by a variety of professionals.
Librarians
Librarians use impact factors to help with collection development decisions. As library budgets continue to lose pace with increasing journal subscription costs, the measure of a journal's quality, or prestige, can help them determine which journals to add to their collections or which to cancel.
Impact factors may also be used to help students and other library users evaluate the quality and appropriateness of the sources retrieved in a literature search.
Publishers
Publishers use impact factors for marketing purposes: to identify opportunities for new journal launches and to expand, merge, or discontinue existing titles.
Authors
Impact factors help authors decide where to publish. They can also help authors to discover new, or foreign, journals in their specialty areas to peruse for current awareness.
Academic Administrators
Recently, one of the most significant uses of impact factors has been in the process of faculty evaluation. Impact factors of the journals in which candidates for promotion and tenure have been published have been used to help determine the impact, or importance, of their research. While this practice grew out of the desire to find objective qualitative measures to complement the peer review process, it has been controversial.
Next month we will discuss some of the limitations and criticisms of journal impact factors.
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