Editorial

Clarivate Analytics recently released the latest Journal Impact Factors. Before saying any more, I refer the reader to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (sfdora.org), which summarizes a number of compelling arguments against using the Impact Factor (or, by implication, any other journal prestige metric) as 'a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist's contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions'. Among DORA supporters and signatories are major research funders such as Wellcome, over 12 000 individuals, and several dozen journals. Some of these periodicals will be familiar to the reader but others not, such as the Journal of Negative and No Positive Results. Other journals with improbable names are missing from DORA, including Small (which has a sizeable IF of 9.598), Soft Matter (3.709) and Silence, which went forever quiet in 2014 without ever achieving an Impact Factor despite focusing on the hot topic of RNA interference.

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