In light of the present heat wave in journal impact factors in China, we should have sober mind to keep against going to another extreme direction, especially for the academic community.

It seems the academic community around the world all attaches great importance to the impact factor of a journal but in many cases the actual meanings of the IMPACT FACTOR  are forgotten, and the differences in the subjects and research fields are ignored when dealing with the impact factor.

In the Researchgate, Judie Arulappan asked the following question:" Please explain the method of calculating impact factor of a journal ? "

Although she only asked how to calculate impact factor, then colleagues talked more about the value of the impact factor and whether it can be taken as the tool to value a research!

The followings are the comments of several colleagues and mine.

 Robert Williams:  

Theodora says, it is the average number of citations each article receives over the past two years in that jounal. In some fields of mathamatics and the physical sciences there may be only a few people in the world who can immediately understand the importance of a paper, or there may be only a few working in that field, whereas in the biological sciences and, in particular, medicine, there are usually many researchers working in most fields, and the importance of a paper can be more easily understood by everyone. Just look at the distribution of membership in ResearchGate on the home page. Very few in math and physics, most in medicine, next most in biology. For this reason, impact factors cannot be compared across disciplines. They cannot. That members of ResearchGate in medicine and biology have the highest scores is only a reflection of this failure in comparability. There are many other problems with impact factors on top of this that make them not only a poor way of evaluating journals, but also a destructive way of evaluating individual papers and researchers. One only needs to do a little research, looking for the many papers published about the failure of impact factors to have any meaningful value. I would like to start a movement, here and now, to abolish impact factors from Researchgate, and from the journals themselves since now they are only a marketing tool. It is really more important that a paper reveals something new and contributes to someone elses work, or to your own, in a way that leads to real progress. Sometimes these trails are hard to follow. So, let's hear some votes to abolish impact factors. 

 Theodora Issa(Curtin University Australia )Well, my understanding this relates to the times the papers in this journal are cited, and what impact they had on the line of research they have been discussing or evaluating... well, now it seems there are several methods and on daily basis we might see some more!!! innovation is the key ... wait and see! This is especially as the value of the article that you will be publishing is hidden in the impact factor of the journal you are publishing in!

David Wright-Carr ·(Universidad de Guanajuato):

Impact factors may be ignored as a trivial manifestation of academic imperialism. If we pay no attention to them, they will become even more insignificant than they already are. 

Peter Stockinger (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales )

I agree with Robert Williams and David Wright-Carr's critical remarks: in human sciences, the question of "impact factor" is even worse and it is rather easy to understand that "behind" this question there are mainly economical reasons that prevail over intellectual ones. 

Dunlian Qiu (Journal of Mountain Science)  

The impact of a journal is now mostly decided by the cited times by other publications and espcially by the publications in the Web of Science.
One article can be read by many people but never be cited. If a journal has published a great deal of papers that are very popular in the academic circle but the citation is low, can we say the journal has low impact? 

Peter Stockinger:

Dear colleague Dulian Qiu: This an excellent question. In my opinion, it points to the obvious (but unfortunately forgotten) fact that "impact" is a notion or a concept and that it has to be defined.
For simply technical reasons, the implicit definition which seems to be shared by many people is explicit quotation (citation).
I believe, that this is extremely oversimplified and doesn't reflect at all the epistemological and historical complexity the undelies the notion of (scientific) impact.
And I also think its uncritical use can possess harmful consequences in research (at least as far as social and human sciences are concerned).