The Reduced Impact of Impact Factors on the History of Economics Community

Abstract

In this contribution I argue that the reduced impact of the impact factors’ culture in the history of economics community is due to three interlinked main motives, namely: the belonging to a disciplinary field with a reduced number of practitioners who tend to downgrade the relevance of quantitative metrics as a substitute for quality assessment; the preference for publication formats where books and book chapters play an important role; and the increasing adherence to alternative solutions for impact measurement. The discussion of these motives leads to the defence of new approaches fostering further improvements in the bibliometric coverage of academic outcomes, as well as in open access policies and publishing strategies.

Keywords

• history of economics
• impact factors
• journal metrics
• altmetrics
• open access
• open science