 Additional drawbacks include the marginalization of research in vernacular languages and on locally relevant topics, inducement to unethical authorship and citation practices as well as more generally fostering of a reputation economy in academia based on publishers" prestige rather than actual research qualities such as rigorous methods, replicability and social impact.Using journal prestige and the JIF to cultivate a competition regime in academia has been shown to have deleterious effects on research quality.JIFs are still regularly used to evaluate research in many countries which is a problem since a number of outstanding issues remain around the opacity of the metric and the fact that it is often negotiated by publishers.