In this month’s editorial, we reflect on the journal impact factor and its relationship to impact, especially for publishing methods papers.

Here are a few additional links that readers may find interesting:

The recent HEFCE  (Higher Education Funding Council for England) review of the use of metrics, including the journal impact factor, for research assessment can be found here.

The ASCB’s San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), from a few years ago, can be found here.

An editorial from Nature Materials analyzing the ability of the journal impact factor to predict median citations over 5 years can be found here.