The ethical and social effects of the obsession over Journal Impact Factor

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The current obsession with the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) has a strong and in most ways deleterious influence on both individual scientists and scientific societies (Schloss and Cuomo 2023). In a previous editorial, Onstad (2024) showed that JIF is of little value and can be misleading, in assessing the value of entomological publications. He concluded that “The JIF was not created to be used in the scientific reward system, but rather a construct of publishers to compete. It does not represent a quantitative measure of the relative value of an author or a paper to society or science. Entomologists must not be influenced by JIF when they submit an article, read an article or judge one.” In the following discussion, we highlight the consequences for the entomological community of the current obsession with JIF and citations. We argue that this obsession has a disproportionately negative effect on women, small cohorts of scientists working in highly circumscribed fields, and non-profit scientific societies. We end with a plea for entomologists to help counteract this trend.