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Slides of the presentation given at the 2022 LIS Bibliometrics Conference (day 2) held on October 12th 2022. The main theme of the conference was "Measuring What Matters". Abstract The Impact Factor (IF) has been the subject of much criticism and controversy, particularly in the current state of advocacy for more responsible metrics and reforms of research assessment. Much of this criticism focuses on how and why the metric itself is flawed, i.e. how it favors citation-dense fields, how it presents skewed citation distribution in using average data, and how it does not correlate with quality of research, nor its reliability. Little attention, however, has been paid to how and why the IF brand may jeopardize bibliodiversity in the scholarly publishing landscape, i.e. diversity as it can relate to journal-level variables such as publishing model, world regions and language(s) of publication, subject categories, publisher, and APC prices (if any). Measuring these variables and assessing in what ways they may reflect a lack of bibliodiversity is of crucial importance if we want to promote an equitable and sustainable scholarly publishing landscape and research assessment culture. This lightning talk will present highlights of this counting-back strategy, which we applied to IF journals included in the 2021 Journal Citations Report. Our results indicate that the IF brand shows little diversity in terms of languages and country of publications, reinforces the oligopoly of academic publishing, and produces disincentives for fair and equitable Open Access by favoring hybrid journals and high APC prices. On the whole, this lack of bibliodiversity is very much sustained by big commercial publishers and the Global North. We suggest that this state of bibliodiversity of the IF brand should also be taken into account in future endeavors of research assessment reforms, which cannot happen without a reflection on the decolonization of scholarly publishing. Video recording The video recording of this presentation is available in the following output - DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7311282
journal impact factor, academic publishing, oligopoly, linguistic diversity, bibliodiversity, bibliometrics, impact factor, research assessment, research assessment reform, APC, hybrid journals
journal impact factor, academic publishing, oligopoly, linguistic diversity, bibliodiversity, bibliometrics, impact factor, research assessment, research assessment reform, APC, hybrid journals
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 0 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Average | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Average | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Average |
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