Reflections on the use of scientometric indicators

The increase in scientific production in the world stimulated the creation of mechanisms for quantification, control, tracking and dissemination of produced knowledge. The appearance of large libraries and further technological advances that allowed the digital storage of documents has enabled better management of scientific production in the world. Soon, the need for measuring the production of researchers, institutions and countries was present and several methods have been proposed as the impact factor, the H index and its variations, contemporary H index, H index of citing articles, M quotient, G index, SJR, SNIP and Eigenfactor. In general, the calculations of each of these models takes into account the number of articles published and citations received for these items in a given period of time. Because they are used for the determination of scientific performance, these indexes often suffer significant distortion resulting in unreliable data. This paper aims to discuss these questions indicating negative and positive points of some of the most widely used indexes and its possible distortions of these indices.