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Summary: 434 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 58, NUMBER 3
NefariousNumbers
Douglas N. Arnold and Kristine K. Fowler
The impact factor has been widely adopted as a
proxy for journal quality. It is used by libraries to
guide purchase and renewal decisions, by research-
ers deciding where to publish and what to read,
by tenure and promotion committees laboring
under the assumption that publication in a higher-
impact-factor journal represents better work, and
by editors and publishers as a means to evaluate
and promote their journals. The impact factor for
a journal in a given year is calculated by ISI (Thom-
son Reuters) as the average number of citations in
that year to the articles the journal published in the
preceding two years. It has been widely criticized
on a variety of grounds:
1,2,3,4
· A journal's distribution of citations does not
determine its quality.
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