Impact factor impacting our scientific research - Probable solutions.

Dear sir,

We read with interest the correspondence “ How is impact factor impacting our research ?” by Rawat S [1] and the response “ Questioning the impact of journal impact factor on research? “ by Kanchan T and Krishan K, [2] published in Biomedical journal. The primary article written by Rawat S [1] is scientifically appreciable. Both the authors are in the view that Journal impact factor is a pseudo objective parameter for considering promotions, allocating research grants by the administrators in the universities and research funding agencies from within or outside universities. Due to this the authors have taken advantage of citing their own references published in the same journal and increasing the scope of their publication inturn increasing author citation and facilitating self citation by the journals. Considering an example – An author has already published ten articles in one of his subject oriented journal, when he publishes the 11th article in the same journal he cities all his old ten references, though he takes either one word or one sentence from his old references. This is a hidden double edged benefit for both the authors and the journal to improve the Impact factor. The journal also encourages this and publishes their articles.”

We partially agree to the suggestions posted by Kanchan T and Krishan K, [2] that excluding journal self citations could be one of the simple measures while calculating JIF. Complete exclusion of self citations will inturn reduce the scientific quality of the paper, instead a correction factor could be employed to limit the number of self citations in a particular journal. Adding to this, a software should be developed which checks and quantitatively restricts the number of self citations in a particular journal and curtails this Impact factor mania in scientific publication.