Lankesteriana a no impact journal... or is it?

Abstract

The word impact comes from the Latin impactus, to push against. It is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as, among others, “to have a direct effect on”. In the realm of scientific publishing, impact is measured in the sense of the journal Impact Factor (IF). The IF is calculated by “considering all citations in 1 year to a journal’s content published in the prior 2 years, divided by the number of substantive, scholarly items published in that journal in those same 2 years”. In other words, impact is defined as the direct effect in one year of the journal’s content published the two preceding years. Easy and fair enough. Nevertheless, the Impact Factor has a copyright, and this mathematical calculation can be officially done only by one private entity, Thomson Reuters. And things go downhill from there.