By P.J Ezeh [Department of Sociology & Anthropology, University of Nigeria, Nsukka]

Again, I can’t possibly issue an exhaustive list for lack of space. The position of the European Association of Science Editors that was issued in 2007 was one of the most charitable ones in that it advised that Impact Factor should be used cautiously for limited purposes. It suggested using it to compare the influence of journals but not for assessment of individual articles.

Early on, in 2004, the British House of Commons had directed the Higher Education Funding Council of England not to take prestige of journals into account in deciding on grants but to focus on the quality of individual articles. In 2010 the German Foundation of Science issued a guideline directing assessors to focus on individual articles and not on Impact Factor scores or any such other bibliometric calculations.

The San Francisco Declaration against Impact Factor was made on 16 December last year (2012) and made available to the scientific community worldwide on 17 May this year (2013). By then thousands of practitioners in diverse branches of learning had added their signatures to the original 233. Makers of this document were categorical in condemning the use of Impact Factor.

The Declaration said, inter alia,   in its preamble, “It is critical to understand that the Journal Impact Factor has a number of well-documented deficiencies as a tool for research assessment”. The scientists and scholars issued an 18-point guideline in the document. Number 1 in the guideline was: “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.”

The interesting thing is that lately in the international fora it is the voices of those in the physical and medical sciences where the Impact Factor calculation originated that are becoming louder and louder against it. Ditto for the Americans and the Europeans who introduced it. Like our colleagues everywhere in the world, those of us Nigerians in the qualitative Social Sciences, Education, Humanities and Art specialisations simply ignored it until, in the case of the University of Nigeria, a precipitate retroactive introduction of the criterion in the 2011 Appraisal for the promotion into the ranks of Senior Lectureship, Readership and Professorship.

On that occasion, the higher administration made publications in Impact-Factor-rated journals compulsory for all disciplines in the University after the Appraisal had been concluded at Departmental and Faculty levels and returned all affected submissions for a repeat.

Unlike our friend whose article I am reacting to, I will restrict myself to the discussion of the Impact Factor per se, and not discussion of the University’s internal administrative blunder. The only thing I can say about that is that ASUU UNN Branch did the most responsible thing in appointing a Committee to study and make recommendations on the matter. Glad that Professor Onwubiko observed how popular the report was, going by the excitement he described in his narrative.

One curious remark that is so conspicuous throughout the professor’s article is his disdain for knowledges [yes, knowledges!] that flow from Nigerian autochthonous systems. Anyone who is abreast with facts of our recent history and happenings in the international scene at the moment will marvel at the incongruity of this position in a discourse that is supposed to be about production of effective knowledge with social relevance.

Evidence abound that production of knowledge that ignore local historical and cultural realities is a wild goose chase. Knowledge is a continuum. As a human group, you use what you know to engage what you want to know. Indeed on the subject of industrialisation that the professor cites, the problem of Nigeria since after the civil war is that leaders make the unrealistic assumption that they can leapfrog the nation-state into effective competition in the modern world relying entirely on extraneous ideas.

On the level of the individual the equivalent is that of the unlikely berk who imagines that as a trader he can prosper by solely picking the brains of a rival with whom he is in competition. It doesn’t just work that way, and those who brought in this idea of globalisation, of which the Impact Factor proposal is one of its ludicrous abortions, know this. Yes, people can give and take in a highly interdependent world but it amounts to lunacy to think that effective ideas flow only from one provenance.

With particular reference to industrialisation, does anyone still remember that Eastern Nigeria that was fed with ideas from University of Nigeria was once the fastest industrialisation economy in the whole world? It was just in 1963, and the statistics were from the Americans’ Michigan State University’s world survey. Note that the performance was not fortuitous. It was designed.

Nationalists who worked for the Independence, the likes of Mbonu Ojike, Nwafor Orizu, Adekoge Adelabu, and the rest of them, were determined to engage modernity unashamed of their identity and autochthonous systems.