• DOI:10.1159/000108334
• Corpus ID: 7595296

Reaction of Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica on the Current Trend of Impact Factor Measures

@article{Schutte2007ReactionOF,
  title={Reaction of Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica on the Current Trend of Impact Factor Measures},
  author={Harm K. Schutte and Jan G. {\vS}vec},
  journal={Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica},
  year={2007},
  volume={59},
  pages={281 - 285}
}

• H. K. Schutte, J. Švec
• Published 1 October 2007
• Medicine
• Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica

and phoniatrics. For instance, in the ISI category of otorhinolaryngology, the journals devoted to otology have generally a higher impact factor than journals in laryngology and a much higher impact factor than a journal devoted specially to phoniatrics. Based on this, the ‘importance’ of phoniatricians is considered to be lower than that of laryngologists and much lower than that of otologists. Consequently, phoniatricians are judged as less ‘scientifically valuable’ than otologists and laryngologists. To defend their scientific value, the phoniatricians are forced to avoid their special journal, i.e., our journal Folia Phoniatrica and Logopaedica (FPL), and publish in other, larger and usually more widespread journals. This has a negative effect on our journal. In the case of logopedics, belonging to the ISI category of ‘rehabilitation’, the situation is comparable. In this ISI category there are also journals covering, e.g., neurology, sport sciences, cancer rehabilitation, orthopedics or emergency medicine. These are fields which are larger, especially in manpower working in this field, and more lucrative than speech rehabilitation and consequently have a larger impact factor. Specifically, the impact factor of our FPL journal reached the value of 0.655 in 2006, which is the highest in the journal’s history. Still, according to the Social Sciences Edition of the ISI Journal Citation Report, this value of the impact factor makes the FPL to rank only at the 33rd place out of 49 It has become the current trend to measure the status of a scientific journal by its impact factor and to measure a scientist by the impact factor of journals in which he/she publishes. While the underlying idea is good, applying the measure universally leads to highly disturbing trends. Based on country policies, some universities and their departments, especially in Europe, have started to distribute finances based on the average impact factor and average ‘relative impact factor’ (i.e., journal ranking based on impact factor within a subject category recognized by the Thomson Scientific Institute for Scientific Information, ISI) calculated from all the publications published by the scientific staff. In order to financially survive, the scientific staff should publish in journals with the highest impact factor possible. Any publication in a journal with a low impact factor or low relative impact factor decreases the overall score of the department. Consequently, researchers are strongly recommended to avoid journals with low impact factors. These criteria negatively affect the scientists working in small under-researched and nonlucrative fields [1] . The fields of logopedics and phoniatrics are good examples of such fields. The field of logopedics has been assigned by ISI to the more general category of ‘rehabilitation’, while phoniatrics belongs to the ISI category of ‘otorhinolaryngology’. Both these ISI categories contain other fields which are of larger impact than logopedics