Artigo de Opinião / Letter: The tyranny of the impact factor: why do we still want to be subjugated?

Abstract

A collective obsession with the Impact Factor (IF) has led to major changes in political science in many countries, and in recent years, these changes have been especially visible in Brazil. Despite critiques of both this measure’s ability to evaluate the scientific publications and its spread in the evaluation of researchers and institutions, Brazil has taken the IF as an important element in evaluating Brazilian graduate programs. In this article, we briefly try to demonstrate that the IF can be subject to many biases that seem to be completely ignored or unknown.