Journal impact factor: Does it really have an impact?

Impact factor: does it have an impact?

Editor, The journal’s impact factor is at present, considered a yard stick for measuring the relative quality and significance of a journal. It is defined as the frequency with which the ‘average article’ in a journal has been cited in a particular year or period. For a given year, this is calculated as the total number of citations received in that year to articles published in the previous tw...

Does the impact factor have too much impact?

Long-term vs. short-term journal impact: does it matter?

The first published report on journal impact factors was included in E. Garfield, I.H. Sher, "New factors in the evaluation of scientific literature through citation indexing," American Documentation, 14[3]:195-201, July 1963. The late Irving H. Sher, who then was director of R&D at the Philadelphiabased Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), and I created the impact factor to help evaluat...

Journal Impact Factor: it will go away soon.

Like many other investigators who participate on editorial boards of various journals, I have witnessed the emergence of the so-called ‘‘Journal Impact Factor’’ over the last 10 years. The Impact Factor (IF) is a number derived by dividing the number of citations a journal receives over a period of time by the number of papers published. It is an average indicator of how frequently papers publi...

Does Criticisms Overcome the Praises of Journal Impact Factor?

Journal impact factor (IF) as a gauge of influence and impact of a particular journal comparing with other journals in the same area of research, reports the mean number of citations to the published articles in particular journal. Although, IF attracts more attention and being used more frequently than other measures, it has been subjected to criticisms, which overcome the advantages of IF. Cr...