 In fact, the JIF is a highly-manipulated metric, and the justification for its continued widespread use beyond its original narrow purpose seems due to its simplicity (easily calculable and comparable number), rather than any actual relationship to research quality.Empirical evidence shows that the misuse of the JIF – and journal ranking metrics in general – has a number of negative consequences for the scholarly communication system.These include confusion between outreach of a journal and the quality of individual papers and insufficient coverage of social sciences and humanities as well as research outputs from across Latin America, Africa, and South-East Asia.