Related papers: Impact Factor: outdated artefact or stepping-stone…
Journal Impact Factor is a popular metric for determining the quality of a journal in academia. The number of citations received by a journal is a crucial factor in determining the impact factor, which may be misused in multiple ways.…
The two most used citation impact indicators in the assessment of scientific journals are, nowadays, the impact factor and the h-index. However, both indicators are not field normalized (vary heavily depending on the scientific category)…
Ageing of publications, percentage of self-citations, and impact vary from journal to journal within fields of science. The assumption that citation and publication practices are homogenous within specialties and fields of science is…
We investigate the journal impact factor, focusing on the applied mathematics category. We discuss impact factor manipulation and demonstrate that the impact factor gives an inaccurate view of journal quality, which is poorly correlated…
The proliferation of surveys and review articles in academic journals has impacted citation metrics like impact factor and h-index, skewing evaluations of journal and researcher quality. This work investigates the implications of this…
In this paper we present "citation success index", a metric for comparing the citation capacity of pairs of journals. Citation success index is the probability that a random paper in one journal has more citations than a random paper in…
Journal impact factors (JIFs) are widely used and promoted but have important limitations. In particular, JIFs can be unduly influenced by individual highly cited articles and hence are inherently unstable. A logical way to reduce the…
Because the Impact Factor (IF) is an average quantity and most journals are small, IFs are volatile. We study how a single paper affects the IF using data from 11639 journals in the 2017 Journal Citation Reports. We define as volatility the…
The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) has been heavily criticized over decades. This opinion piece argues that the JIF should not be demonized. It still can be employed for research evaluation purposes by carefully considering the context and…
Historically, papers have been physically bound to the journal in which they were published but in the electronic age papers are available individually, no longer tied to their respective journals. Hence, papers now can be read and cited…
We show that as a consequence of basic properties of elementary arithmetic journal impact factors show a counterintuitive behaviour with respect to adding non-cited articles. Synchronous as well as diachronous journal impact factors are…
The Journal Impact Factor and other indicators that assess the average citation rate of articles in a journal are consulted by many academics and research evaluators, despite initiatives against overreliance on them. Despite this, there is…
We study how a single paper affects the Impact Factor (IF) by analyzing data from 3,088,511 papers published in 11639 journals in the 2017 Journal Citation Reports of Clarivate Analytics. We find that IFs are highly volatile. For example,…
The bibliometric measure impact factor is a leading indicator of journal influence, and impact factors are routinely used in making decisions ranging from selecting journal subscriptions to allocating research funding to deciding tenure…
Allocation of research funding, as well as promotion and tenure decisions, are increasingly made using indicators and impact factors drawn from citations to published work. A debate among scientometricians about proper normalization of…
The academic publishing world is changing significantly, with ever-growing numbers of publications each year and shifting publishing patterns. However, the metrics used to measure academic success, such as the number of publications,…
There is a widespread impression that the scientific journal "Astronomy & Astrophysics" (A&A) has a smaller impact, as measured by citations to articles, than some of the other major astronomy journals. This impression was apparently…
The empirical distribution function of citations to journal articles (EDF for short) can become the fundamental tool for analyzing the scientific journals. Endeavors at making bibliometric analysis independent of the intuition of average…
With the passage of more time from the original date of publication, the measure of the impact of scientific works using subsequent citation counts becomes more accurate. However the measurement of individual and organizational research…
The impact of scientific publications has traditionally been expressed in terms of citation counts. However, scientific activity has moved online over the past decade. To better capture scientific impact in the digital era, a variety of new…