Research with Impact
Source: http://researchcounselling.wordpress.com/ (now deleted)

Yesterday Thomson-Reuters finally released their impact factors for 2013. And ours is …

5.322

Which has gone down by 0.602 from last year. This also means we’ve moved down to 15th in the Ecology rankings. And what is worse is that the Journal of Ecology has overtaken us!

Impact factors are notorious for only covering 2 years of citations, which is not a long time in ecology. Our five year impact factor is 6.587, which puts us 9th in ecology, and ABOVE JOURNAL OF ECOLOGY. This is only from 4 years of publication of MEE, so we’re even giving everyone else a head start.

What can we conclude from this? Clearly, the 2 year impact factor is not adequately capturing the performance of ecological journals and the 5 year impact factor is a far, far superior measure of performance. Anyone who suggests differently must be in the pay of Big-JIF.

Alternatively, it suggests that we are still doing well as a journal: our papers are getting cited, and presumably read (but see Know-Thine-Own-Self Results). Having good metrics like the (5-year) impact factor is nice, but these are a reflection of quality, not the quality itself. There is more than one way that research can have an impact, which is why we are happy to continue to have Altmetric scores on all of our papers.