The Joint Committee on Quantitative Assessment of Research representing the International Mathematical Union (IMU), the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM), and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) has just released a report on the use of citation statistics in scientific research.  The report concludes that the belief that citation statistics are accurate measures of scholarly performance is unfounded, that use of such statistics is often highly subjective, and that "sole reliance on citation data provides at best an incomplete and often shallow understanding of research."  In addition, the report concludes that "the validity of statistics such as the impact factor and h-index is neither well understood nor well studied."

Given the increasing reliance on the impact factor measures in economics for evaluation of scholarly research, this report should be of interest for all individuals in the field whose research is evaluated in this manner.  The report is available at:

http://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/Report/CitationStatistics.pdf

John Davis