From a historical perspective, the journal impact factor (JIF) was first proposed by Eugene Garfield to “eliminate the uncritical citation of fraudulent, incomplete or obsolete data by making it possible for the conscientious scholar to be aware of criticisms or earlier papers.”¹ Citations subsequently found other uses, such as to rate the importance of journals, articles, or authors. We agree that alternate citation metrics are available that are journal-, article-, or author-specific.² Nevertheless, we chose to focus on the JIF in our study because of its universality and comprehensibility and because none of the newer citation metrics (including altmetrics such as the number of views or downloads) are unequivocally superior to the JIF.³ It is also noteworthy that altmetrics are easier to manipulate than the JIF.⁴

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从历史的角度来看，期刊影响因子 (JIF) 最早是由尤金·加菲尔德 (Eugene Garfield) 提出的，目的是“通过让尽职尽责的学者意识到批评或早期论文的存在，消除对欺诈、不完整或过时数据的不加批判的引用”。¹引文随后发现了其他用途，例如评估期刊、文章或作者的重要性。我们同意可以使用特定于期刊、文章或作者的替代引文指标。²尽管如此，我们还是选择在我们的研究中关注 JIF，因为它具有普遍性和可理解性，并且因为没有一个较新的引文指标（包括其他指标，例如查看次数或下载量）明显优于 JIF。³同样值得注意的是，altmetrics 比 JIF 更容易操作。⁴