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Oh, and for evaluations, I need to list 5 years of my papers with the journals IFs, and quartiles. Mind you, I don't have subscriptions for any of these databases

She showed it to me it was very fancy - showed the institutes best cited works, collaborators, etc. Not a suprise now that for grants I need to indicate my H indexes for Scopus, WoS, Russian citation index, how much papers in each database for the last 5 years, how many of them are Q1, etc, d naseum

Well, it's Scopus and Clarivates business, sell access to databases, yes, but also sell their tools for the database analysis. Sell it to governments - where are your best scientists? Sell it to grant orgs - what's the labs with the best ROI? Journals - which papers will do better? Etc.

And because these KPIs are hard to achieve with limited resources, you get fraudsters, publications in predatory journals, publications in borderline predatory mega journals, etc.

Senior author papers only?

Great question, although it's also possible to argue that at least a current impact factor might have been affected by your actual citations. Either is terrible in its own unique way!

I certainly don’t remember anything about backdating or historical IF data.

Ah, got it. Thanks!

It's sweet that you would think that this might be surprising. Outside of the science evaluation reform bubble, this (& other similar metrics) is exactly the kind of total nonsense that is still systematically and broadly used to evaluate research, people & institutions.

I’ve heard the same thing being done officiously in France (despite Inserm and CNRS adhering to DORA on paper). To add to the non sense, also weighting depending on author position and shared first/last; eg dividing the IF by number of co first authors, mechanically penalizing collaborative efforts😩