How impact factor game is hampering translational research

Sharon Begley has written an interesting piece in Newsweek magazine about how traditional publishing model in academia slows the search for cures. Impact factor has immersed as one of the major potential threats for bench-to-bedside discoveries. Rather than engaging their research to find the cures, scientists have locked most of their time to get published in prestigious or high impact journals in order to receive short term incentives in form of federal funding. On one side funding agencies are pushing hard for translational medicine (see NIH road map for translational research) and same time they are also discouraging scientists to adopt bench-to-bedside approach by promoting impact factor game. In Sharon words

The desire for academic advancement, perversely, can also impede bench-to-bedside research. “In order to get promoted, a scientist must publish in prestigious journals,” notes Bruce Bloom, president of Partnership for Cures, a philanthropy that supports research. “The incentive is to publish and secure grants instead of to create better treatments and cures.” And what do top journals want? “Fascinating new scientific knowledge, [not] mundane treatment discoveries,” he says. Case in point: in research supported by Partnership for Cures, scientists led by David Teachey of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia discovered that rapamycin, an immune-suppressing drug, can vanquish the symptoms of a rare and sometimes fatal children’s disease called ALPS, which causes the body to attack its own blood cells. When Teachey developed a mouse model to test the treatment, he published it in the top hematology journal, Bloodin 2006. But the 2009 discovery that rapamycin can cure kids with ALPS? In the 13th-ranked journal. The hard-core science was already known, so top journals weren’t interested in something as trivial as curing kids. “It would be nice if this sort of work were more valued in academia and top journals,” Teachey says. Berish Rubin of Fordham University couldn’t agree more. He discovered a treatment for a rare, often fatal genetic disease, familial dysautonomia. Given the choice of publishing in a top journal, which would have taken months, or in a lesser one immediately, he went with the latter. “Do I regret it?” Rubin asks. “Part of me does, because I’m used to publishing in more highly ranked journals, and it’s hurt me in getting NIH grants. But we had to weigh that against getting the information out and saving children’s lives.”