A meta-analysis of impact factors of astrophysics journals
Abstract
We calculate the 2024 impact factors for the 38 most widely used journals in Astrophysics, using the citations collated by NASA/ADS (Astrophysics Data System) and compare them to the official impact factors. This includes journals which publish papers outside of astrophysics such as PRD, EPJC, Nature, etc. We also propose a new metric to gauge the impact factor based on the median number of citations in a journal and calculate the same for all the journals. We find that the ADS-based impact factors are mostly in agreement, albeit higher than the official impact factors for most journals. The journals with the maximum fractional difference in median-based and old impact factors are JHEAP and PTEP. We find the maximum difference between the ADS and official impact factor for Nature.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2410.03342,
title = {A meta-analysis of impact factors of astrophysics journals},
author = {Rayani Venkat Sai Rithvik and Shantanu Desai},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.03342},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
10 pages, 2 figures. More journals added. Also added miscellaneous publication statistics as well as APC details. Accepted for publication in EPJP