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Re: Quality not quantity

Dear Editor,

It was interesting to read this article by Dakik et al. However I think that the assessment of an individual author or institutions on the basis of the number of the articles published and the "Impact Factors" of the journals is fundamentally flawed and lies at the root of various issues in biomedical literature. At its best, Impact Factor is only an approximate assessment of the relative merit of an individual article or an author.

Lack of an independent tool to assess the importance of an article has led to use of "quantity of articles", rather than their "quality" as an indicator of an individual author’s productivity. This has the potential to drive away the researchers from engaging in work intensive, time consuming, high quality research and forces them to deal in numbers. This is also at the root of various ethical issues concerning authorship.

It is time scientific community focussed on developing a numerical score that could assess the merit of an individual article. Such an "Article Impact Factor" would naturally have to take into account following aspects.

1. Many journals currently provide free opportunity for submission of comments online. This practice could be adopted universally and selected reviewers with established credentials in the field should be encouraged to post their comments on the articles, and at the same time rate it for quality. A cumulative "Peer Review Score" could then be calculated for each article taking into account all the comments and individual reviewer’s rating.

2. Any assessment of article impact factor would have to take into account the number of times the article is cited by other researchers and the currently used Impact Factor modified suitably for the job may serve the purpose.

3. Also with increasing digitalisation of medical literature, it should be relatively easy to assess the number of times an individual article is read, viewed or downloaded. With safeguards, this could be used to indicate the impact of an article on the scientific community.