Impact Factor of Journals in the area of Education and Training: A documentary critique

Scientific journals are the primary mode of formal communication in science. The ISI Impact factor serves as a bibliometric indicator that measures the average citation rate of an article in a journal and has been widely used for the assessment of the quality of scientific production of individuals, research teams or institutions. The purpose of this paper was to present the impact factor, examine the main limitations in its calculation and applications and to give a general overview of the impact factor of education journals for the period of 2000–2005. Several problems related to the calculation of the impact factor have raised serious concerns about its validity and usefulness. Our findings suggest that education journals included in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) represent about 11% of the active referred academic journals. Education journals have relatively low impact factors in absolute values and in comparison to other Social Science categories. Application of the supraclass correlation coefficient showed that journals belonging to the Education and Educational Research category had relatively stable impact factor values for the examined 6 years. This was not the case for the journals from the Education and Educational Special category. It was concluded that the use of impact factor for evaluation of journals, articles and researchers must be carried out with considerable care.