Background. The Journal Citation Reports journal impact factors (JIFs) are widely used to rank and evaluate journals, standing as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field. However, numerous criticisms have been made of use of a JIF to evaluate importance. This problem is exacerbated when the use of JIFs is extended to evaluate not only the journals, but the papers there...

The Journal Citation Reports (JCR) of the Science Citation Index (SCI), published by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), provides a comprehensive database for analysis of journals. Recent use of JCR's journal impact factor for evaluation of journals and authors has provoked strongly mixed reactions among investigators. This paper examines the effects of the rapidly expanding literatu...

The impact factor of a journal is one of the most discussed issues among the new editors of low-tier journals. This is probably because the impact factor is commonly used as one of the best and popular metrics of journal quality (1,2). Thus, an editor who wants to become successful might be evaluated according to her or his journal’s impact factor. However, impact factors are slow to change and...

J ournal impact factors (JIFs) have become a widely used tool to judge the quality of scientific journals and single publications. JIFs are calculated by the scientific division of Thomson Reuters and published annually in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). At first, the JCR’s origin was guided by the needs of librarians who wanted to use a quantitative method to select journals for their hold...