Faisal Nazeer Hussain, Amina Husnain.
Impact factor: is it an essential tool to assess a medical journal?.
J Coll Physicians Surg Pak Jan ;17(6):382-3.

The use of journal impact factors instead of actual article citation counts is probably the most controversial issue. Granting and other policy agencies often wish to bypass the work involved in obtaining actual citation counts for individual articles and authors. This may be the case if Higher Education Commission recommendations are to be followed without keeping the peer opinion of the journal. Recently published articles may not have had enough time to be cited, especially, if they have been published in smaller or local journals. This tempts one to use the impact factor as a surrogate or virtual count for want of a more realistic yard- stick, like being suggested by many circles, details of which fall beyond the scope of present communication. There is need to improve the standard of local journals, most of whom are not yet indexed, peer review of each article by subject experts, more voluntary inclusion of reviewers into the article / journal review process and open discussion of this matter at various fora ( like many medical editors have already taken the lead in their publications). Higher Education Commission should hold the implementation of its decision and let the peers of each specialty concur over this matter and rate the publications in a more realistic way. This is a Review article.

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