Yes, an “insurrection” and meant in all seriousness and supported by name journals.
Apparently, the original reason for creating the metric “journal impact factor”—average number of citations in a set period —was to determine what science journals cash-strapped academic libraries should order in the 1950s. Now, its influence is accused of distorting science:
The San Francisco declaration cites studies that outline known defects in the JIF, distortions that skew results within journals, that gloss over differences between fields, and that lump primary research articles in with much more easily cited review articles. Further, the JIF can be “gamed” by editors and authors, while the data used to compute the JIF “are neither transparent nor openly available to the public,” according to DORA.
Since the JIF is based on the mean of the citations to papers in a given journal, rather than the median, a handful of highly cited papers can drive the overall JIF, says Bernd Pulverer, Chief Editor of the EMBO Journal. “My favorite example is the first paper on the sequencing of the human genome. This paper, which has been cited just under 10,000 times to date, single handedly increased Nature’s JIF for a couple of years.”
Remember this stuff when someone tries to downplay an article that casts doubt on Darwinism (or similar flimflam) by claiming that the journal that published it has a low impact factor.
The critics can only have it both ways if they are truly Darwinists. But so many of them claim not to be “that kind of Darwinist any more” that they probably can’t make use of their “have it both ways” exemption so safely ( = the Darwin-doubting article doesn’t matter if a “low impact” journal published it, but they will spend publicly funded time persecuting the author anyway).