1.1 History
Eugene Garfield originally designed the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) to help librarians choose journals that deserved a subscription. The JIF aggregates number of citations to articles published in each journal, and then divides that sum by the number of published and citable articles. Since that time, the JIF has become the hallmark of the quality of the journal and has been widely used for the evaluation of research and researchers, even at the institutional level. It therefore has a major role in the field of research (Quader, 2021).
Deep changes have affected scholarly publishing, but the process itself has remained remarkably stable during centuries. It includes four key functions that have accompanied scientific publishing since the 17th century:
- 1.
Registration with attribution system
- 2.
Certification with peer review system
- 3.
Dissemination with distribution and access system
- 4.
Preservation with permanent archiving system
The main objective of this practice is therefore to improve the relevance and accuracy of scientific discussions by bringing knowledge, perspective and experience. Although experts often criticize peer review for a number of reasons, the process is still often considered the “gold standard” of science.
Academic publications have been used for years to disseminate academic research and scholarships. Articles from academic journals, books, thesis etc. are published and the quality of these results are guaranteed by the peer review quality system. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.
To publish a research article in the United States, the time between submission and publication of an academic article can vary a lot. In average, it takes about 4 to 8 months for publishers and reviewers to get a return after submitting the article.
Most researchers are still evaluated to date by their number of scientific publications and by their number of citations. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the web is called grey literature (Systematic review, n.d.). Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. In this context standards are essential to guarantee the quality of the productions of the research results.