“Stunned, very confused”: Two more journals push back against Impact Factor suppression

At least two more journals are fighting decisions by Clarivate — the company behind the Impact Factor — to suppress them from the 2019 list of journals assigned a metric that many rightly or wrongly consider career-making.

In a letter to the editorial board of Body Image, an Elsevier journal that was one of 33 suppressed by Clarivate for excessive self-citation, editor in chief Tracy Tylka and nine journal colleagues write:

We are stunned, very confused, and think that this decision is unfair. Implicit in the decision to suppress the journal’s impact factor is the suggestion that editors have attempted to ‘game’ the system (e.g., by soliciting self-citations, preferentially accepting submissions with high self-citations, etc.). We share Clarivate’s view that such practices are unethical, but completely reject any suggestion that we have engaged in gaming the journal’s impact factor.

The editors acknowledge that the self-citation percentages seem high at first glance, but explain:

In 2015, our self-citation percentage (i.e., number of self-citations divided by total number of self-and other-citations) was 32.75%, in 2016 it was 40.4%, in 2017 it was 33.45%, and in 2018 it was 30.5%. These percentages were never flagged, and neither Tom [Cash, the founder of the journal] nor I were ever sent an “editor expression of concern” letter. This year, it was 50.4%.

While these percentages, especially 2019, seem high and alarming, it is important to put them into perspective. We calculated the number of self-citations, on average, that would need to appear in an article to reach a 30%, 40%, and 50% self-citation rate (assuming a fixed number of other-citations). To reach 30%, each article would only need to include 2 self-citations on average, to reach 40%, each article would only need to include 3 self-citations on average, and to reach 50%, each article would only need to include 4 self-citations on average. (Please note that these are estimates based on last year’s other-citations, as we are still awaiting the data to determine the exact number of self- and other-citations we had from 2019). In a reference list including 40-60 citations, 4 is only 6-10%.

Body Image’s editors say they “will publicly push back against Clarivate” because they 

are very uneasy about a private, for-profit company like Clarivate setting itself up as a self-appointed and unaccountable judge. While Elsevier is looking into setting up a coordinated response of their journals that were suppressed (a total of 9), we will also contact Clarivate directly, as well as Retraction Watch.

‘A direct impact on patient management’

The International Committee on Systematics of Prokaryotes and the Microbiology Society, publishers of the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology, made a similar move. The journal posted a letter on their site that Tasha Mellins-Cohen, Director of Technology and Innovation at the Microbiology Society, had sent to Clarivate appealing the company’s decision. Mellins-Cohen writes that:

…we believe the suppression to be unreasonable and to request Clarivate reinstate IJSEM in the JCR as a matter of urgency.

Like Zootaxa, another taxonomy journal suppressed from Clarivate’s list that is also appealing the decision, self-citation in the field is to be expected, Mellins-Cohen explains:

While IJSEM serves the wider microbiological community and in theory all references to the strains validly published in IJSEM should be cited by researchers working on those strains, there is a very peculiar convention among microbiologists who are not taxonomists which leads them not to cite the taxonomic papers in which their research subject was first described. This convention means that, despite taxonomy being critical to the discipline of microbiology, few articles in other journals will cite taxonomic papers. The primary audience of IJSEM is thus taxonomists, and these are the researchers citing IJSEM. This means taxonomic papers are heavily cited in major reference works such as Bergey’s Manual of Systematics of Archaea and Bacteria (BMSAB, described below). The exclusion of citations from Bergey’s to IJSEM in 2019 has artificially raised the self-citation rate in your dataset. The inclusion of Bergey’s, among other sources, in other datasets has resulted in the self-citation rate for IJSEM in 2019 falling to less than 35% from a peak of over 40% (Figure 1). As both Scopus and the Leiden University CWTS database release their data earlier than the JCR, we had no reason to suspect levels of self-citation at the rate you claim.

Mellins-Cohen acknowledges that there were some suspect patterns:

Having said this, we did identify eight of the 817 groups who published with IJSEM in 2019, that had been artificially inflating their own citation rates via ‘salami slicing’. Despite this representing only 1% of publications in IJSEM, we have already put measures in place to prevent such activity and have applied those measures across the Microbiology Society portfolio. In fact, the current and previous Editors-in-Chief of IJSEM published an editorial calling on authors to avoid salami slicing in early 2018 (https://doi.org/10.1099/ijsem.0.002634) and early interventions to reduce such minimal publications were introduced then. 

While the Microbiology Society is a signatory of the Declaration on Research Assessment, which eschews Impact Factors as a metric for quality, Mellins-Cohen quotes a member who writes:

Removing the Impact Factor of this well respected journal with a high standard of taxonomic descriptions will create confusion, as in some countries (China notably), it is requested to publish in journals with an Impact Factor only. The risk of the present situation is that scientists from these countries will no longer submit their articles to IJSEM and the quality of taxonomic descriptions may decrease, with a direct impact on patient management.

When we asked Clarivate for comment about Zootaxa’s appeal, a spokesperson told us:

We acknowledge that in exceptional circumstances there may be compelling editorial reasons for an atypical level of journal self-citation, which fulfils a genuine scholarly purpose. In such cases we will liaise with the publisher to resolve any appeal as we continue to improve our method of identifying and addressing citation distortion.

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