Impact factor or useless fight

The JIF is a measure of the importance of an academic journal, reflecting the average number of citations of recent articles published in the journal. Therefore, journals with a higher JIF are deemed to be more important than those with a lower JIF. Authors publishing in journals with a high JIF have a competitive advantage. JIF calculation started in 1975 for those journals that were indexed in the Journal Citation Report (www.nd.edu/-pkarmat/citations/citations.html). Initially, most of the researchers considered the JIF an impartial and reliable validation. They even appreciated the simplification of a complex evaluation to a number that allowed a very simple and immediate comparison. For a short time, this was the single generally accepted solution, despite the complication in calculating the JIF. However the JIF’s dominance has been short. Some started to consider the matter in a different way and the criticism finally converged into a protest. The main proposed solutions are to continue with the JIF as it is, to revise and correct it, or to adopt other evaluation methods.