For this week I tried to find an article which I could relate to another project I am working on. But it proved hard to find articles published in a journal with an impact factor above 1. Most articles on sound and music computing seem to be published in conference proceedings which have a lower impact factor. So I asked myself whether this really was a good measurement.
So first I checked the wikipedia article to see how it was calculated. It is basically the number of times articles of the last two years were cited divided by the number of citable article this year. Sounds pretty straightforward to me. But from my view this is not necessarily a measurement of how "good" the articles were. For example we may consider the Schön scandal. Jan Hendrik Schön published a number of articles in prestigious journals such as Science and Nature that later proved to be fraudulent. The high impact factor didn't protect the reader against "bad" science.
Furthermore, as far as I have understood a journal in a multi-disciplinary field will get a lower impact factor since articles refer to a lot of different journals. Also, the impact factor is not comparable between disciplines as the citation rate differs.
There are several ways to affect a journal's impact factor. For example publishing review articles often increases it. Another more extreme example was when Folia Phoniatrica et Logopædica editors Schuttea and Svec (2007) published an article with heavy critique against the impact factor including citations of all articles published in the same journal for the last two years. This increased the impact factor of that journal from 0.66 to 1.44.
So, what can we conclude from this short critique of the impact factor? It is, obviously, a good measure of impact as long as journal editors don'r rig the conditions but it is not a guarantee that the contents are scientific. We should still be critical readers.
Note:
Jan Hendrik Schön is not a relative of mine... ;)
References:
Schuttea, H. K., Svec, J. G. (2007). "Reaction of Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica on the Current Trend of Impact Factor Measures". Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica 59 (6): 281–285. doi:10.1159/000108334.PMID 17965570
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal
I am not sure the "impact factor" is a good way to estimate a journal because, as you said, it is difficult for a multidisciplinary journal to get the same IF of a strict focused one.
SvaraRaderaThis in my opinion could affect the quality and depth of research, often the relationship between two different study areas particularly clarifies casualties we did not know before.
I completely agree with you, I am very sceptical of the impact factor especially in media studies since it is such a broad, cross disciplinary subject. I think in a wide subject like this both information quoted and used can be subject to be taken out of context depending on the authors intentions in his own research, compared to a more stable concrete field such as maths.
SvaraRadera