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Journal impact factors: a 'bioequivalence' issue?

A Rostami-Hodjegan¹, G T Tucker

¹University of Sheffield, Section of Molecular Pharmacology and Pharmacogenetics, Clinical Sciences Division, The Royal Hallamshire Hospital, Sheffield S102JF, UK.

British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology

|March 22, 2001

Summary

Journal Impact Factors (JIFs) do not accurately reflect individual research impact due to wide citation variability. Log-transforming citation data reveals smaller differences between clinical pharmacology journals, suggesting a more equitable comparison.

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Area of Science:

Bibliometrics
Scholarly Communication
Research Evaluation

Background:

Journal Impact Factors (JIFs) are widely used by institutions to assess the quality of individual research output.
Despite emphasis on cautious use, formal analyses of JIFs' validity for individual research assessment are limited.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the validity of using JIFs as a measure of individual research impact.
To analyze citation profiles of three clinical pharmacology journals.

Main Methods:

Compared citation patterns of 120 papers from Clin Pharmacol Ther, Br J Clin Pharmacol, and Eur J Clin Pharmacol across multiple years.
Utilized an analogy with drug pharmacokinetics (lag-time, Cmax, tmax, t(1/2), AUC(t)) to analyze citation-time profiles and assess 'bioequivalence'.

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Main Results:

Citation distributions for individual publications were highly variable and skewed across all journals.
Wide 90% confidence intervals for JIFs of individual publications indicated significant variability (e.g., 0.24-16.94 for CPT).

Conclusions:

JIFs are not a reliable indicator of an individual paper's impact.
Log-transforming citation data, analogous to bioequivalence testing, reveals smaller absolute differences between clinical pharmacology journals.
This transformation better represents the likelihood of citation for a median article, suggesting a more equitable comparison of journal impact.