"Counting Back": What kind of bibliodiversity does the Impact Factor brand reflect? A case study of IF journals included in the 2021 Journal Citations Report

The Impact Factor (IF) has been the subject of much criticism and controversy, particularly in the current state of advocacy for more responsible metrics and reforms of research assessment. Much of this criticism focuses on how and why the metric itself is flawed, i.e. how it favors citation-dense fields, how it presents skewed citation distribution in using average data, and how it does not correlate with quality of research, nor its reliability. Little attention, however, has been paid to how and why the IF brand may jeopardize bibliodiversity in the scholarly publishing landscape, i.e. diversity as it can relate to journal-level variables such as publishing model, world regions and language(s) of publication, subject categories, publisher, and APC prices (if any). Measuring these variables and assessing in what ways they may reflect a lack of bibliodiversity is of crucial importance if we want to promote an equitable and sustainable scholarly publishing landscape and research assessment culture.

This lightning talk will present highlights of this counting-back strategy, which we applied to IF journals included in the 2021 Journal Citations Report. Our results indicate that the IF brand shows little diversity in terms of languages and country of publications, reinforces the oligopoly of academic publishing, and produces disincentives for fair and equitable Open Access by favoring hybrid journals and high APC prices. On the whole, this lack of bibliodiversity is very much sustained by big commercial publishers and the Global North. We suggest that this state of bibliodiversity of the IF brand should also be taken into account in future endeavors of research assessment reforms, which cannot happen without a reflection on the decolonization of scholarly publishing.