“Impact” – This word is not without connotations. For instance, if I wanted to get a stronger impact with a newspaper, I would choose the thickest and largest format, I would roll it up and I would certainly be able to generate an impact as I hammer it on a fly. Impact is first and foremost a violent term.

Of course, today, when a journal gets an ‘impact factor’, that military rhetoric is forgotten, probably because many of us also forgot what war is about (Figure 1). The impact factor is a ranking tool for scientific journals. It was created by Eugene Garfield at the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia, USA. The first impact factors appeared in 1975, concomitantly with the rise of the economic neoliberal model, and consistently with the obsession of scientists for metrics. In short, the impact factor is ‘a measure of the frequency with which the “average article” in a journal has been cited in a particular year or period (…) The [two-year] impact factor of a journal is calculated by dividing the number of current year citations to the source items published in that journal during the previous two years’ (ISI, 1994).

Figure 1.

Dandelion’s crested achenes are flying and waiting for impact. Credit photo: Hasan Almasi (Unsplash, 3 May 2018, Canon, EOS 7D).

Because this tool provides a number, it also fuels reductionist thinking: one may assign the complex value of a journal to a single number. This can be pernicious. In fact, this is a well-established fact, whatever the metrics. The Goodhart law says it all: ‘when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be reliable’. The race for a high impact factor is no exception. It has produced:

• • an inflation in the number of scientific publications (since more publications mean more citations),

• • an increased pace of publications (to be able to produce more publications),

• • and as a result, an increased conservatism in scientific discovery in the past decades, as shown by Park et al., in a seminal article (Park et al., Reference Park, Leahey and Funk2023).

This race for producing and publishing articles in high-impact-factor journals has also facilitated many problematic feedback loops:

• • an increased rate of fraud in scientific publications (because the increased pace reduces the ability of reviewers to control the contents) (Fang et al., Reference Fang, Steen and Casadevall2012; Richardson et al., Reference Richardson, Hong, Byrne, Stoeger and Amaral2025),

• • the proliferation of predatory journals, where (financial) impact prevails over (scientific) rigour and ethics (Laine et al., Reference Laine, Babski, Bachelet and Zakhama2025),

• • the definition of salaries and bonuses based on publications, using the impact factor as a rewarding tool (Owen, Reference Owen2019),

• • the scientific publishing financial boom (e.g., when Elsevier’s profits outperformed those of Apple, Google or Amazon in 2010) (Buranyi, Reference Buranyi2017), with important biases in what gets to be published and where.

As Cambridge University Press Quantitative Plant Biology reaches its 5th anniversary in 2025, it also got its first impact factor. As one can imagine from this preamble, we are welcoming this news with mixed feelings.

On the one hand, this is a recognition of the journal belonging to a larger scientific community and a measure of the citations across the scientific literature. Quantitative Plant Biology’s impact factor reached 2.5 in 2025, and we are thrilled to see such dynamics.

On the other hand, that number ignores what is important to us – that is, what one can find in the journal:

• • New angles on noise (Bhalerao, Reference Bhalerao2024), on somatic mutations in trees (Iwasa et al., Reference Iwasa, Tomimoto and Satake2024), on intermittent stresses (Gama et al., Reference Gama, Martin and Drew2025) or on light heterogeneity (Claydon et al., Reference Claydon, Sutton, Redmond and Ezer2025);

• • New resources to study plant morphogenesis – for example, for root posture (Yagi et al., Reference Yagi, Hara-Nishimura and Ueda2024), for zygote growth (Kang et al., Reference Kang, Nonoyama, Ishimoto and Tsugawa2024), for leaf growth with a quantitative atlas (Tolleter et al., Reference Tolleter, Smith, Dupont-Thibert and Curien2024), for sepal curvature with a morphospace (Battu et al., Reference Battu, Kiss, Delgado-Vaquera, Sénéchal, Mollier, Hartasánchez, Boudaoud and Monéger2025), for stem shape with four-dimensional phenotyping (Yoshida et al., Reference Yoshida, Kunita, Toda, Ueda and Higaki2025), for gynoecium growth with time-lapse imaging (Wodniok, Reference Wodniok2025) and with many deep-learning methods (Hong et al., Reference Hong, Zhou and Han2025; Wanner et al., Reference Wanner, Kuhn Cuellar, Rausch and Nahnsen2024);

• • The strong emphasis on systems thinking – for example, regarding patterning and micromechanics (Jacobs et al., Reference Jacobs, Saltini, Molenaar, Filion and Deinum2025), synthetic gene circuits (Khan & Lister, Reference Khan and Lister2025), fruit growth (Chung et al., Reference Chung, Yun and Kim2025) or hypoxia (Chen et al., Reference Chen, De Boer and Ten Tusscher2025);

• • A collection of review articles on ion homeostasis in plant cells (Dreyer et al., Reference Dreyer, Hernández-Rojas, Bolua-Hernández and Michard2024; Contador-Álvarez et al., Reference Contador-Álvarez, Rojas-Rocco, Rodríguez-Gómez and Dreyer2025), with independent focuses on silicon (Huang & Ma, Reference Huang and Ma2024), phosphorus (Chiang et al., Reference Chiang, Yayen and Chiou2025), calcium (Brownlee & Wheeler, Reference Brownlee and Wheeler2025), zinc (Krämer, Reference Krämer2025), potassium (Wegner et al., Reference Wegner, Pottosin, Dreyer and Shabala2025), iron (Leskova et al., Reference Leskova, Xiong, Mari and Curie2025), manganese (Meier et al., Reference Meier, Mariani and Peiter2025) or chloride (Silva-Herrera et al., Reference Silva-Herrera, Wege, Franzisky, Ahmad, Roelfsema and Geilfus2025);

• • Post-normal scientific themes, such as tools to avoid human biases when analysing patterns (Galipot, Reference Galipot2025) and a call for participatory approaches (Correa et al., Reference Correa, Charreyre, Hamant and Thomas2025);

• • Societal applications from quantitative plant biology – for example, for the maple syrup industry (McNulty et al., Reference McNulty, Silvestro, He, Gennaretti and Rossi2025);

• • Last but not least, the authors – many world experts in their fields – and their creativity, with tributes to seminal past articles (e.g., on Turing (Siero & Deinum, Reference Siero and Deinum2025)).

In addition to content, the impact factor also overlooks the essentials of the journal:

• • a community-based editorial board,

• • a not-for-profit publisher (Cambridge University Press) and partner institution (John Innes Centre),

• • a rigorous reviewing process,

• • strong ethics (fully open access, free waivers available and community).

In the end, rather than using data to provide a number (reductionist path), our journal is all about quantitative thinking – that is, just the opposite: how to use numbers in the data to provide new questions (systemic path). Thus, our goal is not to reduce biology to numbers, but rather to use numbers to expand our understanding of the complexity and richness of the plant world. As we celebrate the journal’s anniversary, we would prefer to move away from impacting the reader with a factor, but instead call for a pact with our readers to broaden the exploration of the plant world and its many surprises.