To explore various critiques if author and journal impact factors, please see the following articles.
This guide is designed to bring information, tools, tips and and tutorials on measuring and broadening your research impact together in one place. Citation analysis (a type of bibliometrics) provides one way of examining the impact of a particular article or other type research product (e.g., data set, conference paper, patent). Journal impact factors (JIFs) are one way of looking at the relative importance of a journal within a particular field. Neither method is without limitations, however. Some cautions include:
Further caveats are that: seminal research is often taken for granted and not cited; negative citations - those critical of a work - are counted as valid citations; and the system can be manipulated by such means as self-citation, multiple authorship, splitting outputs into many articles and publishing in journals favoring highly cited review articles..
Nevertheless, citation analysis is often a big part of what is considered for promotion, tenure and grant funding - and Journal Impact Factor is often considered when searching for a publishing venue that offers high visibility and citation rate.
Before you begin to delve into the various citation metrics, we recommend you do the following three things (more on the below is found in the Broadening Your Impact page of this guide: