The Illusion of Impact: Why Metrics Donāt Tell the Whole Story
For academic researchers, āImpact Factorsā is a familiar term ā it is designed to measure the impact of your publications. If you are outside of the academic world, you have probably never encountered it, but how much do these metrics really tell us? Impact factors emerged as a way to compare research papers. Academia often measures a researcherās success by the number of publications, which influences tenure and promotion decisions at universities. The problem was that not all journals and papers are of the same quality. Universities needed a way to determine the caliber of research without having to actually read every paper. The solution? If a paper was cited by other researcher within a few years of publication, it is assumed that the paper and the journal it appears in must have an impact. Over time, this has evolved into a formal system for calculating Impact Factors, with journals proudly listing their scores. To judge individual papers, metrics like ācategorized-normalized citation impactā were developed using similar logic along with a āpercentile groupā score to compare a researcherās work with papers in a similar field. But I question: āimpact on whomā? I feel that the impact of a paper in