Related papers: Bias in the journal impact factor
The ISI-Impact Factors suffer from a number of drawbacks, among them the statistics-why should one use the mean and not the median?-and the incomparability among fields of science because of systematic differences in citation behavior among…
We generated networks of journal relationships from citation and download data, and determined journal impact rankings from these networks using a set of social network centrality metrics. The resulting journal impact rankings were compared…
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…
Articles in high-impact journals are, on average, more frequently cited. But are they cited more often because those articles are somehow more "citable"? Or are they cited more often simply because they are published in a high-impact…
Purpose: Journal Impact Factors and other citation-based indicators are widely used and abused to help select journals to publish in or to estimate the value of a published article. Nevertheless, citation rates primarily reflect scholarly…
The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is linearly sensitive to self-citations because each self-citation adds to the numerator, whereas the denominator is not affected. Pinski & Narin (1976) derived the Influence Weight (IW) as an alternative to…
This paper proposes an indicator of journals' scientific prestige, the SJR indicator, for ranking scholarly journals based on citation weighting schemes and eigenvector centrality to be used in complex and heterogeneous citation networks…
A review of Garfield's journal impact factor and its specific implementation as the Thomson Reuters Impact Factor reveals several weaknesses in this commonly-used indicator of journal standing. Key limitations include the mismatch between…
Using percentile shares, one can visualize and analyze the skewness in bibliometric data across disciplines and over time. The resulting figures can be intuitively interpreted and are more suitable for detailed analysis of the effects of…
Probably Not. Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) was introduced to address the limitations of traditional metrics like the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), particularly its inability to normalize citation impact across different disciplines. This…
We study the statistics of citations made to the indexed Science journals in the Journal Citation Reports during the period 2004-2013 using different measures. We consider different measures which quantify the impact of the journals. To our…
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…
The journal impact factor is not comparable among fields of science and social science because of systematic differences in publication and citation behaviour across disciplines. In this work, a source normalization of the journal impact…
Citation averages, and Impact Factors (IFs) in particular, are sensitive to sample size. We apply the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) to IFs to understand their scale-dependent behavior. For a journal of $n$ randomly selected papers from a…
Impact factors (and similar measures such as the Scimago Journal Rankings) suffer from two problems: (i) citation behavior varies among fields of science and therefore leads to systematic differences, and (ii) there are no statistics to…
Eigenfactor.org, a journal evaluation tool which uses an iterative algorithm to weight citations (similar to the PageRank algorithm used for Google) has been proposed as a more valid method for calculating the impact of journals. The…
Evaluation of journals for quality is one of the dominant themes of bibliometrics since journals are the primary venue of vetting and distribution of scholarship. There are many criticisms of quantifying journal impact with bibliometrics…
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…
A simple abstract model is developed as a parallel experimental basis for the aim of exploring the differences of journal impact factors, particularly between different disciplines. Our model endeavors to simulate the publication and…
There exist ample demonstrations that indicators of scholarly impact analogous to the citation-based ISI Impact Factor can be derived from usage data. However, contrary to the ISI IF which is based on citation data generated by the global…