The Inflation of Impact Factors of Scientific Journals.
For many years, the scientific community made use of the Journal Impact Factor, created by Garfield and Sher in 1963 and commercially distributed by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI-today part of Thomson Reuters), to approximate the standing of an academic periodical. Nowadays, we are confronted with a multitude of different impact factors, namely, the (old) ISI Impact Factor, the (new) five-year Thomson Reuters impact factor, the trend line of Elsevier's Scopus, the H index of journals, the SCImago index by the Spanish SCImago Group, and the Eigenfactor score created by Carl Bergstrom. How can we keep an overview? What do these indices measure? What does "standing of a journal" mean: its impact on the scientific community, its perceived reputation, its value, its quality, its prestige, its influence? Is there a kind of toolbox with different infometric tools to describe and evaluate scholarly journals? Is there a leading indicator? And-above all-are journal impact indicators really useful?

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