Too little impact

Drs. Wilfred T. Tysoe & Nicholas D. Spencer | TLT Cutting Edge December 2019

Tribology journals generally have low impact factors. Here’s why it matters. 

You may never have heard of Eugene Garfield (1925-2017). He was a linguist and a businessman and one of the pioneers in the fields of bibliometrics and scientometrics. His legacy includes the impact factor (IF), which is a measure of the number of citations that an average paper receives per year in a given journal.

Most of us in tribology have backgrounds that correspond to larger communities such as mechanical engineering, physics, materials science or chemistry. When we decide where to publish our research results in tribology, this often means that we are not limited to only tribology journals for showcasing our best work. It is tempting to go for the highest-IF journal in which that work could appear, especially bearing in mind the data (from 2019) in Figure 1.


Figure 1. Journal impact factors from 2019.

A reason to do this is that IF is often used, especially by those unfamiliar with the field, as an easy way to judge journal quality and, thus, indirectly to judge the quality of those who are able to publish their work in those journals. For academics, such value judgments can feed into funding, promotion and hiring decisions. A problem at the outset for the tribology community is that impact factors scale with the size of the field. Tribologists choosing to publish good work in non-tribology journals compound this effect. The vicious cycle is depicted in Figure 2.


Figure 2. The vicious cycle of impact factor for small disciplines such as tribology.

The consequence is that tribology as a field becomes chronically undervalued. Tribologists seeking academic jobs, in particular, are regarded as less competitive, and funding for them may be more difficult to obtain because tribology comes to be regarded as being of “low impact potential.” In other words, the short-term benefit of getting a paper published in a high-IF journal leads to a long-term penalty of degrading the field as a whole!

The use of a journal’s IF to signal the merits of an individual researcher or study is obviously flawed, even to casual observers. Many universities and other organizations worldwide have signed the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) (1). They propose alternative approaches to IF for evaluating research since (a.) citation distributions within journals are highly skewed, (b.) the properties of the IF are field-specific: it is a composite of multiple, highly diverse article types, including primary research papers and reviews, (c.) IFs can be manipulated (or “gamed”) by editorial policy and (d.) data used to calculate the IFs are neither transparent nor openly available to the public. The goals of DORA are laudable, but it is questionable as to how successful it will be in addressing the psychology of journal choices.

What can we do about this? The situation requires tribologists to perform a cost-benefit analysis by taking into account all the costs and benefits of publication choices. After considering both halves of the analysis, it seems that it is in the long-term interest of most of us to publish our best work in tribology journals despite the short-term cost of reduced personal prestige. As a community, we do outstanding work and have the power to bend this vicious cycle in our favor; a few years of coordinated investment in our discipline might even be enough to reverse the direction of the feedback loop.

Improving the public and scientific/engineering-peer perception of tribology is an issue that we all should be working on for ourselves but, more important, for all those who follow us in the field. While it is a high priority for STLE and for the International Tribology Council, ultimately the power to restore the value of tribology as a brand will reside within us and our publication choices.

FOR FURTHER READING
1. Available here.
Eddy Tysoe is a distinguished professor of physical chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. You can reach him at wtt@uwm.edu.

Nic Spencer is professor of surface science and technology at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and editor-in-chief of STLE-affiliated Tribology Letters journal. You can reach him at nspencer@ethz.ch.