Various publishers have been putting out press releases to celebrate their new (2007) Impact Factors, each with their own spin on the numbers awarded by Thomson Reuters (the new name for Thomson ISI) to their journals.
Outsell Insights, a market research and analysis organisation for the publishing and media sector, has produced a report on the new Impact Factors (subscription to Outsell required), drawing attention to the recent mathematicians’ criticism of the metric (highlighted on 13 June on this forum).
Daniel Pollock, author of the Outsell report, writes that “any market researcher will tell you, some data, even if flawed, is better than none at all…which is the whole point. There is simply no alternative that is gaining the wide acceptance enjoyed by the IF.” He believes that the obstacles to creating a new metric, as things stand are formidable, involving cooperation between “many, often-competitive parties; the repositories of content of mutually agreeable curation; and sufficiently unfettered access to allow transparent analytics tools to do something useful.” He believes that the Impact Factor is here to stay — well, for a while, at least.