ACS Chemical Health & Safety, formerly Journal of Chemical Health & Safety, has been on the forefront of developing chemical safety as a subdiscipline of chemistry. Originally published by the American Chemical Society from 1994 to 1998 as a trade Maganal (a magazine/journal hybrid), it returned to the Society from Elsevier in 2020. Just before the first issue in its current format appeared in January 2020, we received an email from a potential author profusely apologizing for a decision to withdraw a submission. Evidently, superiors advised the author that ACS Chemical Health & Safety did not have an impact factor and that publishing in it could negatively affect the author’s career. A 2019, Chronicle of Higher Education article by Manya Whitaker echoed this sentiment.(1) The article explains what a pretenure professor must achieve between earning a Ph.D. and submitting for a tenure track position, noting “it is incredibly important to prioritize getting published in the highest-valued venues in your discipline, department, and institution. That means saving any other projects for after you’ve earned tenure.” Whitaker lists standard criteria to identify publications that will “count” toward tenure and promotion, which include that a journal must be peer reviewed and that a publisher must have credibility. Credibility can be gleaned in part by reviewing its impact factor and value within its field. Value is more difficult to quantify, but the impact factor is, at its core, a citation metric, the number of citations in a year divided by the number of “citable items” published in that journal during the previous two years. Despite being a controversial metric,(2−5) over time a journal’s impact factor was accepted as a symbol of journal quality. According to Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate Analytics), the 2020 impact factor of Nature Chemistry is 24.427, Lancet’s is 79.321, and Journal of the American Chemical Society is 15.419. No one debates the quality of these publications, and each journal listed carries quite a bit of prestige in its respective communities. But what does an impact factor mean to the chemical safety community? Although ACS Chemical Health & Safety is produced by a reputable publisher and is indexed/abstracted in CAS, SCOPUS, Portico, and Web of Science, we have found that potential authors can still be hesitant about submitting to our journal because it not yet evaluated for an impact factor. When evaluated, the number will likely be low due to its highly specialized nature and the fact that while people consume safety information, they may not cite it. Compared to other safety journals listed in Table 1, ACS Chemical Health & Safety is the only journal with one topical category. Take the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, the journal closest in scope to ACS Chemical Health & Safety. While both journals are highly specialized publications, ACS Chemical Health & Safety is even more so, as a broader community practices occupational safety. Both publications are valuable and affect the practice of safety, but viewed only through the impact factor lens (Table 1), they would not appear to be prestigious. Source: Journal Citation Reports, Clarivate Analytics (August 29, 2021). To challenge these preconceptions about impact factor, consider the 2020 Nature Chemistry article “A review and critique of academic lab safety research”, which has been accessed over 31 000 times and cited 35 times to date.(6) Of the 100 references, 42 of them were from Journal of Chemical Health & Safety. Around the same time, Safety Science published “A bibliometric review of laboratory safety in universities”, which identifies Journal of Chemical Health & Safety as the no. 1 publication outlet for the topic of university laboratory safety.(7) While we think this evidence supports changing how we address a journal’s impact, we recognize that it does not immediately help the author who withdrew the submission from ACS Chemical Health & Safety or authors who want to put higher-impact-factor publications on their tenure and promotion packets. In 2021, ACS Publications signed the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). This attestation demonstrates ACS’ commitment as a publisher and professional organization to support broader assessment of research output, as DORA recognizes the need to improve the evaluation criteria of scholarly research outputs. As ACS Chemical Health & Safety matures, we will continue to look at alternative means of impact, like the number of article views or the Altmetric Attention Score, which measures the online attention of an article. The need to look at these metrics is evident when you consider the high number of views and tweets our case studies and commentaries can have, even though they lack a commensurate number of formal citations. DORA is not just for publishers. It has recommendations for funding agencies, institutions, organizations that supply metrics, and researchers,(8) a few of which are listed below.

• General Recommendation: Do not use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.
• For Funding Agencies: Be explicit about the criteria used in evaluating the scientific productivity of grant applicants and clearly highlight, especially for early stage investigators, that the scientific content of a paper is much more important than publication metrics or the identity of the journal in which it was published.
• For Institutions: Be explicit about the criteria used to reach hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions, clearly highlighting, especially for early stage investigators, that the scientific content of a paper is much more important than publication metrics or the identity of the journal in which it was published.
• For Publishers: Make available a range of article-level metrics to encourage a shift toward assessment based on the scientific content of an article rather than publication metrics of the journal in which it was published.
• For Organizations That Supply Metrics: Be open and transparent by providing data and methods used to calculate all metrics.
• For Researchers: When involved in committees making decisions about funding, hiring, tenure, or promotion, make assessments based on scientific content rather than publication metrics.
• Wherever appropriate, cite primary literature in which observations are first reported rather than reviews in order to give credit where credit is due.

General Recommendation: Do not use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions. For Funding Agencies: Be explicit about the criteria used in evaluating the scientific productivity of grant applicants and clearly highlight, especially for early stage investigators, that the scientific content of a paper is much more important than publication metrics or the identity of the journal in which it was published. For Institutions: Be explicit about the criteria used to reach hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions, clearly highlighting, especially for early stage investigators, that the scientific content of a paper is much more important than publication metrics or the identity of the journal in which it was published. For Publishers: Make available a range of article-level metrics to encourage a shift toward assessment based on the scientific content of an article rather than publication metrics of the journal in which it was published. For Organizations That Supply Metrics: Be open and transparent by providing data and methods used to calculate all metrics. For Researchers: When involved in committees making decisions about funding, hiring, tenure, or promotion, make assessments based on scientific content rather than publication metrics. Wherever appropriate, cite primary literature in which observations are first reported rather than reviews in order to give credit where credit is due. Here’s one impact factor we hope you will consider creating after reading this Editorial: If you changed how you think or act to create a safer work environment after reading an article in the journal, send a note to the author. It will matter. This article references 8 other publications.

中文翻译：

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影响因子：朋友还是敌人？

ACS Chemical Health & Safety，前身为Journal of Chemical Health & Safety，一直走在将化学安全发展为化学分支学科的前沿。最初由美国化学学会于 1994 年至 1998 年作为贸易杂志（杂志/期刊的混合体）出版，于 2020 年从爱思唯尔回到学会。就在其当前格式的第一期于 2020 年 1 月出版之前，我们收到了来自潜在作者的电子邮件，为撤回提交的决定深表歉意。显然，上级告诉作者，ACS Chemical Health & Safety没有影响因子，在其中发表可能会对作者的职业生涯产生负面影响。A 2019,高等教育纪事曼雅·惠特克 (Manya Whitaker) 的文章呼应了这种观点。(1) 这篇文章解释了在获得博士学位期间，兼职教授必须达到的目标。并提交终身跟踪职位，并指出“优先考虑在您的学科、部门和机构中价值最高的场所发表论文是非常重要的。这意味着在您获得任期后将任何其他项目保存下来。” 惠特克列出了标准标准，以确定将“计入”任期和晋升的出版物，其中包括期刊必须经过同行评审以及出版商必须具有可信度。可以通过审查其在其领域内的影响因子和价值来部分地收集可信度。价值更难以量化，但影响因子的核心是引用指标，一年中的引用次数除以该期刊前两年发表的“可引用项目”数。尽管是一个有争议的指标，(2−5) 随着时间的推移，期刊的影响因子被接受为期刊质量的象征。根据期刊引用报告（Clarivate Analytics），2020 年影响因子为Nature Chemistry 24.427，Lancet 79.321，Journal of the American Chemical Society 15.419。没有人会争论这些出版物的质量，而且列出的每一种期刊在其各自的社区中都具有相当的声望。但影响因子对化学品安全界意味着什么？尽管ACS 化学品健康与安全由信誉良好的出版商制作，并在 CAS、SCOPUS、Portico 和 Web of Science 中编入索引/摘要，我们发现潜在作者仍然对提交给我们的期刊犹豫不决，因为它尚未评估影响因子。在评估时，由于其高度专业化的性质以及人们在消费安全信息时可能不会引用这一事实，该数字可能会很低。与表 1 中列出的其他安全期刊相比，ACS Chemical Health & Safety是唯一具有一个主题类别的期刊。以职业与环境卫生杂志为例，这是与ACS 化学健康与安全范围最接近的杂志。虽然这两种期刊都是高度专业化的出版物，但ACS Chemical Health & Safety更是如此，因为更广泛的社区实践职业安全。这两份出版物都很有价值并影响安全实践，但仅从影响因子的角度来看（表 1），它们似乎没有什么声望。来源：期刊引证报告，Clarivate Analytics（2021 年 8 月 29 日）。为了挑战这些关于影响因子的先入之见，请考虑 2020 年自然化学文章“学术实验室安全研究的审查和批判”，该文章迄今已被访问超过 31,000 次并被引用 35 次。(6) 在 100 篇参考文献中，42其中来自化学健康与安全杂志。大约在同一时间，安全科学发表了“大学实验室安全的文献计量学评论”，其中确定化学健康与安全杂志作为第一名。1 个关于大学实验室安全主题的出版渠道。(7) 虽然我们认为这一证据支持改变我们应对期刊影响的方式，但我们认识到它不会立即帮助从ACS Chemical Health & Safety或作者撤回提交的作者想要将影响因子更高的出版物放在他们的任期和晋升包中的人。2021 年，ACS Publications 签署了研究评估宣言 (DORA)。该证明表明 ACS 作为出版商和专业组织致力于支持更广泛的研究成果评估，因为 DORA 认识到需要改进学术研究成果的评估标准。作为ACS 化学品健康与安全成熟后，我们将继续研究影响的替代方法，例如文章浏览量或 Altmetric 注意分数，它衡量文章的在线关注度。当您考虑到我们的案例研究和评论可能拥有的大量观看次数和推文时，就很明显需要查看这些指标，即使它们缺乏相应数量的正式引用。DORA 不仅适用于出版商。它对资助机构、机构、提供指标的组织和研究人员提出了建议，(8) 下面列出了其中的一些。

• 一般建议：不要使用基于期刊的指标（例如期刊影响因子）作为衡量个别研究文章质量的替代指标，以评估个别科学家的贡献，或用于招聘、晋升或资助决策。
• 对于资助机构：明确用于评估资助申请人的科学生产力的标准，并明确强调，尤其是对于早期研究人员，论文的科学内容比发表指标或期刊的身份重要得多。它被出版了。
• 对于机构：明确用于达成招聘、任期和晋升决策的标准，明确强调，尤其是对于早期研究人员，论文的科学内容比发表指标或期刊的身份重要得多。它被出版了。
• 对于出版商：提供一系列文章级别的指标，以鼓励转向基于文章的科学内容而不是发表文章的期刊的发表指标的评估。
• 对于提供指标的组织：通过提供用于计算所有指标的数据和方法来保持开放和透明。
• 对于研究人员：当参与委员会做出有关资助、招聘、任期或晋升的决定时，根据科学内容而不是发表指标进行评估。
• 在适当的情况下，引用第一次报告观察而不是评论的主要文献，以便在应有的信用时给予信用。

一般建议：不要使用基于期刊的指标（例如期刊影响因子）作为衡量个别研究文章质量的替代指标，以评估个别科学家的贡献，或用于招聘、晋升或资助决策。对于资助机构：明确用于评估资助申请人的科学生产力的标准，并明确强调，尤其是对于早期研究人员，论文的科学内容比发表指标或期刊的身份重要得多。它被出版了。对于机构：明确用于达成招聘、任期和晋升决策的标准，明确强调，尤其是对于早期研究人员，论文的科学内容比发表指标或发表论文的期刊身份重要得多. 对于出版商：提供一系列文章级别的指标，以鼓励转向基于文章的科学内容而不是发表文章的期刊的发表指标的评估。对于提供指标的组织：通过提供用于计算所有指标的数据和方法来保持开放和透明。对于研究人员：当参与委员会做出有关资金、招聘、任期或晋升的决策时，根据科学内容而不是出版指标进行评估。在适当的情况下，引用第一次报告观察而不是评论的主要文献，以便在应有的信用时给予信用。这是我们希望您在阅读本社论后考虑创建的一个影响因素：如果您在阅读期刊上的一篇文章后改变了您的想法或行为以创建更安全的工作环境，请给作者发一封说明。这很重要。本文引用了 8 篇其他出版物。