Journal impact factor: is it only used in China and South Asia?

Impact factor, as an important indicator for the evaluation of research performance, has always been the concern of scientists and scientometricians. For a long time, many Chinese researchers have believed that impact factor is used as an indicator to evaluate research performance only in South Asian countries and regions, especially in China. In this article, we study how impact factor is presented on the websites of medical journals indexed in Web of Science (WoS) in 2009, and examine the number of articles about impact factor published between 2001 and 2010 in the WoS and Scopus databases. Finally, we summarize the attitude of researchers in various countries towards impact factor. We conclude that impact factor is not only a concern in South Asia but also has a profound influence in Europe and other regions. It is widely used for academic evaluation in various fields. Therefore, infatuation with impact factor is a global phenomenon that has gradually spread to other regions, thus gaining more importance.