Answering the question in the title directly: Academics care about impact factors.

The issues mentioned in my last couple of posts are also particularly clear in the use of impact factors in academia. Impact factors are a way of assigning quantitative value to academic publications. Every person in academia whose opinion I am aware of thinks that impact factors are a bad way of doing this, and sees emphasis on impact factors as a threat to research. Writing papers with a goal of maximizing the impact factor is the academic equivalent of clickbait. You’re writing to get “clicks”–in academia, this is typically converted to number of citations–rather than writing out of any pure motivation to increase our understanding of a topic. Before “clickbait” was a word, this was characterized as making research “sexy”. But there is no external governing body that forces impact factors on academics. Impact factors arise from the behavior of academics and have value only insofar as academics assign value to them. The people who think impact factors are important are the same people who say, “I don’t like it, but that’s just the way the system works and there’s nothing I can do about it.” There’s a particular tidy circle, here. Impact factors are performative. It’s not a report on the objective value of research, but an assigning of value to research. And the people who object to that valuation are precisely the same people who produce that valuation.

There’s a failure of self-recognition that I think is interesting and has wider importance. “That which I oppose myself to” and “that which I create” are identical, and perhaps always are in some sense. To know your enemy, you need a good mental model of that enemy. What you’re reacting to, then, is not so much some external force as that internal model. You know your enemy insofar as you accurately recreate the enemy internally. You can defeat that enemy, too, insofar as the enemy is internalized. To the extent, then, that you are defeating yourself. Everything seems to curve in on itself at this point and it is hard to know how to proceed.