As an academic and a scientist of many years I’ve witnessed the rise of the “exalted” Impact Factor over the past two decades, which has come to dominate tenure, promotion — and judgement of research worthiness in general.

Not in a good way.

The impact factor (IF), or journal impact factor (JIF), of an academic journal is a value that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years by that journ...