Shruti Srivastava1 Rabia Parveen Siddiqui2
Impact factor is the most popular bibliometric measure in use at present. It is a statistical mean reflecting the average number of citations to recent citable articles published by a particular journal. Apart from its intended use to compare journals, it is being increasingly used as a measure of quality of an individual scientist, researcher, author etc. Although it is used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal, being open to manipulations make it an imperfect metric. Editorial policies can influence impact factor and journals are increasing their impact factor by adopting favorable policies. This article is about calculation, significance, use and some misuses of impact factor.
