Book review: The Impact Factor of Scientific and Scholarly Journals: Its Use and Misuse in Research Evaluation
Alvin Hutchinson from Smithsonian Institution Libraries.

Compiled and edited by Braun, T. (2007) Scientometrics Guidebook Series, Volume 2. Hungary: Akadémiai Kiadó. ISBN: 978-963-05-8528-6.

Like the first volume in the Scientometrics Guidebook Series, this second volume draws content from past issues of the journal Scientometrics. The focus of this volume is the merits of the journal Impact Factor (IF) since its introduction as a statistical measure several decades ago. The IF is a standard measurement historically associated with the Institute for Scientific Information and is now being challenged by several statistical alternatives. These alternatives are recognized by many of the book’s contributors (including the father of the IF himself, Eugene Garfield), who warn of the danger of using statistical data out of context and highlight the fact that the IF is only one of several measures that can be used to evaluate scholarship.

This book comes at an important time in the development of research metrics and serves as a historical look at a particular (and once nearly universal) measurement. The emergence of data-mining technologies will undoubtedly show new relationships between scholars and their publications and will alter many assumptions about the IF, which has achieved near iconic status in evaluating research output. However, despite imminent technological change in bibliometric methods and the fact that the book’s contents have been previously published, this compilation is a worthy addition to the collection of any serious scientometrician.