In medio stat virtus: some thoughts about journal Impact Factor

This editorial discusses the Impact Factor (IF) for the present issue of Psychology & Neuroscience. A journal’s Impact Factor is currently the most widely employed tool to express a journal’s quality. Problems in the calculation of this index and its misuse, however, have caused several academic consequences. The concept of Impact Factor was introduced by Gross & Gross who argued that the most frequently cited journals are the most relevant to the field and thus the most valuable journals for a library to purchase. Several criticisms have been raised about the way in which the Impact Factor is calculated. One of the main problems of the Impact Factor is that it does not consider the citation performance of each paper published by the journal. An often-mentioned criticism of the Impact Factor concerns journal self-citation, in which an article in journal “X” cites another article published in the same journal “X.” Another malpractice that can be employed to artificially increase the Impact Factor is that a group of editors can team up for mutual benefit by forming a kind of citation cartel. Despite these problems and potential misuse, the advent of the Impact Factor represented a landmark in the field of scientific publication. IF also has valuable informative advantages that obviously do not justify its indiscriminate use. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)