Eugene Garfield repeatedly warned that impact-factor metrics are unfit for judging individual researchers — the exact misuse later found in the Saudi affiliation scheme
Eugene Garfield, who devised the Journal Impact Factor out of the citation infrastructure he built at the Institute for Scientific Information, repeatedly warned against the very use to which it was later put. In a 1998 letter to Der Unfallchirurg, responding to a German trauma-surgery society's defense of using the impact factor to judge "scientific achievement," he wrote: "The source of much anxiety about Journal Impact Factors comes from their misuse in evaluating individuals, e.g. during the Habilitation process... I have always warned against this use." Seven years later he made the adjacent point about misuse in general to the 2005 International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication in Chicago, saying he "expected it to be used constructively while recognizing that in the wrong hands it might be abused." The metric was designed to describe the average citation rate of a journal, not to rank a person.
This makes Garfield an early, self-implicating voice in the critique that scientific institutions later formalized: his warning anticipates by decades the first general recommendation of claim-dora-2013-declaration-rejects-impact-factor-for-research-assessment, which tells institutions not to use journal metrics to assess an individual scientist's contributions. It also frames the two documented gaming failures the vault tracks — editor-side manipulation in claim-wilhite-fong-2012-coercive-self-citation-common and the outright purchase of a citation credential in claim-saudi-universities-bought-clarivate-highly-cited-researcher-status — as realizations of a misuse the inventor had already named. The recurring shape is Goodhart's Law: a measure built to describe scholarly influence becomes an evaluative target and stops measuring what it once did. Garfield did not just assert the warning; he gave a specific technical reason for it, tying it to wide citation variance among articles within a single journal.
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“The source of much anxiety about Journal Impact Factors comes from their misuse in evaluating individuals, e.g. during the Habilitation process... I have always warned against this use.”