El factor de impacto como criterio para la evaluación de la producción y la calidad científica

Introduction

Currently, there is increasing concern regarding the quality of scientific performance and productivity of the investigators and academicians and aspects of their evaluation. Scientific productivity is considered an indicator of scientific activity of a discipline. Most bibliometrics studies are based on citation analysis. The impact factor is defined as the quotient between the number of citations received by a journal in a specific year compared to the number of articles published in the same journal during the previous two years.

Objective

The objective of this review has been to identify the impact factor as an evaluation criterion of scientific productivity and its quality, applied to periodic publications, institutions and researchers.

Material and methods

To do so, we carried out a search in the data bases MEDLINE, Academic Search Premier and Sportdiscus, using the descriptors Journal Impact Factor, Impact Factor and Bibliometrics, Academies and Institutes, Research.

Conclusions

We found that there is great controversy regarding the use of the impact factor in the evaluation procedures of the quality of scientific productivity of the journals, institutions and researchers. However, the few criteria and alternative indicators accepted by the scientific community and the evaluation committees makes the impact factor to be practically the only one that is accepted and used, especially in Europe.