Abstract
As we editorialized in our last issue, the international scientific community has increasingly rejected the Journal Impact Factor (often called SCI or Science Citation Index) as a valid measure of the worth of scholarly output.1 Yet today, certainly in most or all of Asia, publication in a journal with a high impact factor remains, it seems, the primary measure by which scholars are hired and promoted into academic positions and a major criterion by which research funding applications are considered.
The United States leads the world in the publication of biomedical research. This is both for the better and for the worse. Undoubtedly, many important advances in medicine and science have been imported into Asia and spread across the world from the West, and it's difficult to try to assess the magnitude of the positive impact of this.
There is a negative side, however. While we oversimplify to say so, many if not most Asian scientists and scholars suffer an essential inferiority complex in relation to the West. Inferiority implies a value hierarchy. By what measures, and whose measures, can we rationally place the intellectual or scientific value, or potential such value, of the world's most populous continent above or below that of the other side of the planet? If Asia, or much of it, is trying to play catch-up to the West, it cannot do so by blindly subscribing to – and clinging to – the outdated tools that the West created and essentially controls.
We focus on one metric, the “Journal Impact Factor”, often referred to as “SCI”. The problem need not – and should not – be cast in terms of competition, but rather re-framed in terms of global cooperation: How can the world's researchers and medical clinicians work together – in an understanding of the equality of human worth and the value of diverse voices and logics – to advance our capability, and improve lives? Part of the answer is identifying achievement and potential in researchers, teachers, and clinicians, in every corner of the world, and making sure that the doors are open to their ambitions. Unquestioned acceptance of the SCI helps keep such doors locked, and such locks stand systematically in the way of those who develop in ecosystems outside of the privileged classes of the native English speaking West. This dampens the chances of success for the majority of the world's scholars and professionals (who provide medical services to a majority of the world's population) – not because they lack potential to contribute, but because SCI-worship emblematizes an illusory mismeasure of such potential and capability.
Worse, it seems that Asians have themselves come to place higher faith and credibility in these numbers than do its wealthy but worried owners. Ironically, it seems that Asians themselves more zealously and blindly accept publication in a “high impact” journal, as the first and essentially only measure of value or achievement in the academy. While the West, as epitomized by the San Francisco (!) Declaration on Research Assessment has increasingly come to reject it.2 Indeed, the US National Bureau of Economic Research has published a working paper finding that highly original research papers, “highly novel papers, defined to be those that make more (distant) new combinations, [and] deliver high gains to science … typically are published in journals with a lower than expected Impact Factor” and concludes that “science policy, in particular funding decisions which rely on traditional bibliometric indicators based on short-term direct citation counts and Journal Impact Factors, may be biased against ‘high risk/high gain’ novel research.”3
Many of us know, intellectually, that the SCI does not mean what it's long been purported to mean, yet we often retain our programming such that we go weak at the knees if we hear that someone has published in JAMA or Anesthesiology. Certainly, such generally represents a notable achievement, but when it's the first thing we look for, how much do we overlook? A question, we think, all of us need to consciously bring to mind every time we engage in a related evaluation.
Rather than throw up our hands in acceptance of how people see things, we need (and the authors emphatically place ourselves at the center of this we), we need to stop and think when we ask ourselves what we want to look for in students, job applicants, new professionals, and our peers and colleagues, when we ask ourselves what makes someone's work deserve to be shared, and whether that someone's potential deserves our nurturance.
Conflicts of interest
Both authors declare no conflicts of interest.