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This article is about a measure of journal influence. For other similar metrics, see Citation impact.

The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as indexed by Clarivate’s Web of Science. As a journal-level metric, it is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field; journals with higher impact factor values are given the status of being more important, or carry more prestige in their respective fields, than those with lower values. While frequently used by universities and funding bodies to decide on promotion and research proposals, it has come under attack for distorting good scientific practices.^[1][2][3]

History[edit]

The impact factor was devised by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia. Impact factors began to be calculated yearly starting from 1975 for journals listed in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). ISI was acquired by Thomson Scientific & Healthcare in 1992,^[4] and became known as Thomson ISI. In 2018, Thomson-Reuters spun off and sold ISI to Onex Corporation and Baring Private Equity Asia.^[5] They founded a new corporation, Clarivate, which is now the publisher of the JCR.^[6]

Calculation[edit]

In any given year, the two-year journal impact factor is the ratio between the number of citations received in that year for publications in that journal that were published in the two preceding years and the total number of «citable items» published in that journal during the two preceding years:^[7][8]

For example, Nature had an impact factor of 41.577 in 2017:^[9]

This means that, on average, its papers published in 2015 and 2016 received roughly 42 citations each in 2017. 2017 impact factors are reported in 2018; they cannot be calculated until all of the 2017 publications have been processed by the indexing agency.

The value of impact factor depends on how to define «citations» and «publications»; the latter are often referred to as «citable items». In current practice, both «citations» and «publications» are defined exclusively by ISI as follows. «Publications» are items that are classed as «article», «review» or «proceedings paper»^[10] in the Web of Science (WoS) database; other items like editorials, corrections, notes, retractions and discussions are excluded. WoS is accessible to all registered users, who can independently verify the number of citable items for a given journal. In contrast, the number of citations is extracted not from the WoS database, but from a dedicated JCR database, which is not accessible to general readers. Hence, the commonly used «JCR Impact Factor» is a proprietary value, which is defined and calculated by ISI and can not be verified by external users.^[11]

New journals, which are indexed from their first published issue, will receive an impact factor after two years of indexing; in this case, the citations to the year prior to volume 1, and the number of articles published in the year prior to volume 1, are known zero values. Journals that are indexed starting with a volume other than the first volume will not get an impact factor until they have been indexed for three years. Occasionally, Journal Citation Reports assigns an impact factor to new journals with less than two years of indexing, based on partial citation data.^[12][13] The calculation always uses two complete and known years of item counts, but for new titles one of the known counts is zero. Annuals and other irregular publications sometimes publish no items in a particular year, affecting the count. The impact factor relates to a specific time period; it is possible to calculate it for any desired period. For example, the JCR also includes a five-year impact factor, which is calculated by dividing the number of citations to the journal in a given year by the number of articles published in that journal in the previous five years.^[14][15]

Use[edit]

While originally invented as a tool to help university librarians to decide which journals to purchase, the impact factor soon became used as a measure for judging academic success. This use of impact factors was summarised by Hoeffel in 1998:^[16]

Impact Factor is not a perfect tool to measure the quality of articles but there is nothing better and it has the advantage of already being in existence and is, therefore, a good technique for scientific evaluation. Experience has shown that in each specialty the best journals are those in which it is most difficult to have an article accepted, and these are the journals that have a high impact factor. Most of these journals existed long before the impact factor was devised. The use of impact factor as a measure of quality is widespread because it fits well with the opinion we have in each field of the best journals in our specialty….In conclusion, prestigious journals publish papers of high level. Therefore, their impact factor is high, and not the contrary.

As impact factors are a journal-level metric, rather than an article- or individual-level metric, this use is controversial. Eugene Garfield, the inventor of the JIF agreed with Hoeffel,^[17] but warned about the «misuse in evaluating individuals» because there is «a wide variation [of citations] from article to article within a single journal».^[18] Despite this warning, the use of the JIF has evolved, playing a key role in the process of assessing individual researchers, their job applications and their funding proposals. In 2005, The Journal of Cell Biology noted that:

Impact factor data … have a strong influence on the scientific community, affecting decisions on where to publish, whom to promote or hire, the success of grant applications, and even salary bonuses.^[19]

More targeted research has begun to provide firm evidence of how deeply the impact factor is embedded within formal and informal research assessment processes. A review in 2019 studied how often the JIF featured in documents related to the review, promotion, and tenure of scientists in US and Canadian universities. It concluded that 40% of universities focussed on academic research specifically mentioned the JIF as part of such review, promotion, and tenure processes.^[20] And a 2017 study of how researchers in the life sciences behave concluded that «everyday decision-making practices as highly governed by pressures to publish in high-impact journals». The deeply embedded nature of such indicators not only effect research assessment, but the more fundamental issue of what research is actually undertaken: «Given the current ways of evaluation and valuing research, risky, lengthy, and unorthodox project rarely take center stage.»^[21]

Criticism[edit]

Numerous critiques have been made regarding the use of impact factors, both in terms of its statistical validity and also of its implications for how science is carried out and assessed.^{[3][22][23][24][25]} A 2007 study noted that the most fundamental flaw is that impact factors present the mean of data that are not normally distributed, and suggested that it would be more appropriate to present the median of these data.^[19] There is also a more general debate on the validity of the impact factor as a measure of journal importance and the effect of policies that editors may adopt to boost their impact factor (perhaps to the detriment of readers and writers). Other criticism focuses on the effect of the impact factor on behavior of scholars, editors and other stakeholders.^[26] Further criticisms argue that emphasis on impact factor results from the negative influence of neoliberal politics on academia. Some of these arguments demand not just replacement of the impact factor with more sophisticated metrics but also discussion on the social value of research assessment and the growing precariousness of scientific careers in higher education.^[27][28]

Inapplicability of impact factor to individuals and between-discipline differences[edit]

It has been stated that impact factors in particular and citation analysis in general are affected by field-dependent factors^[29] which invalidate comparisons not only across disciplines but even within different fields of research of one discipline.^[30] The percentage of total citations occurring in the first two years after publication also varies highly among disciplines from 1–3% in the mathematical and physical sciences to 5–8% in the biological sciences.^[31] Thus impact factors cannot be used to compare journals across disciplines.

Impact factors are sometimes used to evaluate not only the journals but the papers therein, thereby devaluing papers in certain subjects.^[32] In 2004, the Higher Education Funding Council for England was urged by the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee to remind Research Assessment Exercise panels that they are obliged to assess the quality of the content of individual articles, not the reputation of the journal in which they are published.^[33] Other studies have repeatedly stated that impact factor is a metric for journals and should not be used to assess individual researchers or institutions.^[34][35][36]

Questionable editorial policies that affect the impact factor[edit]

Because impact factor is commonly accepted as a proxy for research quality, some journals adopt editorial policies and practices, some acceptable and some of dubious purpose, to increase its impact factor.^[37][38] For example, journals may publish a larger percentage of review articles which generally are cited more than research reports.^[8] Research undertaken in 2020 on dentistry journals concluded that the publication of «systematic reviews have significant effect on the Journal Impact Factor … while papers publishing clinical trials bear no influence on this factor. Greater yearly average of published papers … means a higher impact factor.»^[39]

Journals may also attempt to limit the number of «citable items»—i.e., the denominator of the impact factor equation—either by declining to publish articles that are unlikely to be cited (such as case reports in medical journals) or by altering articles (e.g., by not allowing an abstract or bibliography in hopes that Journal Citation Reports will not deem it a «citable item»). As a result of negotiations over whether items are «citable», impact factor variations of more than 300% have been observed.^[40] Items considered to be uncitable—and thus are not incorporated in impact factor calculations—can, if cited, still enter into the numerator part of the equation despite the ease with which such citations could be excluded. This effect is hard to evaluate, for the distinction between editorial comment and short original articles is not always obvious. For example, letters to the editor may be part of either class.

Another less insidious tactic journals employ is to publish a large portion of its papers, or at least the papers expected to be highly cited, early in the calendar year. This gives those papers more time to gather citations. Several methods, not necessarily with nefarious intent, exist for a journal to cite articles in the same journal which will increase the journal’s impact factor.^[41][42]

Beyond editorial policies that may skew the impact factor, journals can take overt steps to game the system. For example, in 2007, the specialist journal Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica, with an impact factor of 0.66, published an editorial that cited all its articles from 2005 to 2006 in a protest against the «absurd scientific situation in some countries» related to use of the impact factor.^[43] The large number of citations meant that the impact factor for that journal increased to 1.44. As a result of the increase, the journal was not included in the 2008 and 2009 Journal Citation Reports.^[44]

Coercive citation is a practice in which an editor forces an author to add extraneous citations to an article before the journal will agree to publish it, in order to inflate the journal’s impact factor.^[45] A survey published in 2012 indicates that coercive citation has been experienced by one in five researchers working in economics, sociology, psychology, and multiple business disciplines, and it is more common in business and in journals with a lower impact factor.^[46] Editors of leading business journals banded together to disavow the practice.^[47] However, cases of coercive citation have occasionally been reported for other disciplines.^[48]

Assumed correlation between impact factor and quality[edit]

The journal impact factor was originally designed by Eugene Garfield as a metric to help librarians make decisions about which journals were worth indexing, as the JIF aggregates the number of citations to articles published in each journal. Since then, the JIF has become associated as a mark of journal «quality», and gained widespread use for evaluation of research and researchers instead, even at the institutional level. It thus has significant impact on steering research practices and behaviours.^[49][50][51]

By 2010, national and international research funding institutions were already starting to point out that numerical indicators such as the JIF should not be considered as a measure of quality.^{[note 1]} In fact, research was indicating that the JIF is a highly manipulated metric,^[52][53][54] and the justification for its continued widespread use beyond its original narrow purpose seems due to its simplicity (easily calculable and comparable number), rather than any actual relationship to research quality.^[55][56][57]

Empirical evidence shows that the misuse of the JIF—and journal ranking metrics in general—has a number of negative consequences for the scholarly communication system. These include gaps between the reach of a journal and the quality of its individual papers^[25] and insufficient coverage of social sciences and humanities as well as research outputs from across Latin America, Africa, and South-East Asia.^{[citation needed]} Additional drawbacks include the marginalization of research in vernacular languages and on locally relevant topics and inducement to unethical authorship and citation practices. More generally, the impact factors fosters a reputation economy, where scientific success is based on publishing in prestigious journals ahead of actual research qualities such as rigorous methods, replicability and social impact. Using journal prestige and the JIF to cultivate a competition regime in academia has been shown to have deleterious effects on research quality.^[58]

A number of regional and international initiatives are now providing and suggesting alternative research assessment systems, including key documents such as the Leiden Manifesto^{[note 2]} and the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). Plan S calls for a broader adoption and implementation of such initiatives alongside fundamental changes in the scholarly communication system.^{[note 3]} As appropriate measures of quality for authors and research, concepts of research excellence should be remodelled around transparent workflows and accessible research results.^[59][60][61]

JIFs are still regularly used to evaluate research in many countries, which is a problem since a number of issues remain around the opacity of the metric and the fact that it is often negotiated by publishers.^[62][63][19]

Negotiated values[edit]

Results of an impact factor can change dramatically depending on which items are considered as «citable» and therefore included in the denominator.^[64] One notorious example of this occurred in 1988 when it was decided that meeting abstracts published in FASEB Journal would no longer be included in the denominator. The journal’s impact factor jumped from 0.24 in 1988 to 18.3 in 1989.^[65] Publishers routinely discuss with Clarivate how to improve the «accuracy» of their journals’ impact factor and therefore get higher scores.^[40][25]

Such discussions routinely produce «negotiated values» which result in dramatic changes in the observed scores for dozens of journals, sometimes after unrelated events like the purchase by one of the larger publishers.^[66]

Distribution skewness[edit]

Because citation counts have highly skewed distributions,^[24] the mean number of citations is potentially misleading if used to gauge the typical impact of articles in the journal rather than the overall impact of the journal itself.^[68] For example, about 90% of Nature‘s 2004 impact factor was based on only a quarter of its publications. Thus the actual number of citations for a single article in the journal is in most cases much lower than the mean number of citations across articles.^[69] Furthermore, the strength of the relationship between impact factors of journals and the citation rates of the papers therein has been steadily decreasing since articles began to be available digitally.^[70]

The effect of outliers can be seen in the case of the article «A short history of SHELX», which included this sentence: «This paper could serve as a general literature citation when one or more of the open-source SHELX programs (and the Bruker AXS version SHELXTL) are employed in the course of a crystal-structure determination». This article received more than 6,600 citations. As a consequence, the impact factor of the journal Acta Crystallographica Section A rose from 2.051 in 2008 to 49.926 in 2009, more than Nature (at 31.434) and Science (at 28.103).^[71] The second-most cited article in Acta Crystallographica Section A in 2008 had only 28 citations.^[72]

Critics of the JIF state that use of the arithmetic mean in its calculation is problematic because the pattern of citation distribution is skewed^[73] and citation distributions metrics have been proposed as an alternative to impact factors.^[74][75][76]

However, there have also been pleas to take a more nuanced approach to judging the distribution skewness of the impact factor. Waltman and Traag^[who?], in their 2021 paper, ran numerous simulations and concluded that «statistical objections against the use of the IF at the level of individual articles are not convincing», and that «the IF may be a more accurate indicator of the value of an article than the number of citations of the article».^[1]

Lack of reproducibility[edit]

While the underlying mathematical model is publicly known, the dataset which is used to calculate the JIF is not publicly available. This prompted criticism: «Just as scientists would not accept the findings in a scientific paper without seeing the primary data, so should they not rely on Thomson Scientific’s impact factor, which is based on hidden data».^[19] However, a 2019 article demonstrated that «with access to the data and careful cleaning, the JIF can be reproduced», although this required much labour to achieve.^[77] A 2020 research paper went further. It indicated that by querying open access or partly open-access databases, like Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and Scopus, it is possible to calculate approximate impact factors without the need to purchase Web of Science / JCR.^[78]

Broader negative impact on science[edit]

Just as the impact factor has attracted criticism for various immediate problems associated with its application, so has there also been criticism that its application undermines the broader process of science. Research has indicated that bibliometrics figures, particularly the impact factor, decrease the quality of peer review an article receiving,^[79] a reluctance to share data,^[21] decreasing quality of articles,^[80] and a reduced scope in terms of what they can research. «For many researchers the only research questions and projects that appear viable are those that can meet the demand of scoring well in terms of metric performance indicators — and chiefly the journal impact factor.».^[21] Furthermore, the process of publication and science is slowed down — authors automatically try and publish with the journals with the highest impact factor — «as editors and reviewers are tasked with reviewing papers that are not submitted to the most appropriate venues».^[77]

Institutional responses to criticism of the impact factor[edit]

Given the growing criticism and its widespread usage as a means of research assessment, organisations and institutions have begun to take steps to move away from the journal impact factor. In November 2007 the European Association of Science Editors (EASE) issued an official statement recommending «that journal impact factors are used only—and cautiously—for measuring and comparing the influence of entire journals, but not for the assessment of single papers, and certainly not for the assessment of researchers or research programmes».^[23]

In July 2008, the International Council for Science Committee on Freedom and Responsibility in the Conduct of Science issued a «statement on publication practices and indices and the role of peer review in research assessment», suggesting many possible solutions—e.g., considering a limit number of publications per year to be taken into consideration for each scientist, or even penalising scientists for an excessive number of publications per year—e.g., more than 20.^[81]

In February 2010, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) published new guidelines to reduce the number of publications that could be submitted when applying for funding: «The focus has not been on what research someone has done but rather how many papers have been published and where.» They noted that for decisions concerning «performance-based funding allocations, postdoctoral qualifications, appointments, or reviewing funding proposals, [where] increasing importance has been given to numerical indicators such as the h-index and the impact factor».^[82] The UK’s Research Assessment Exercise for 2014 also banned the journal impact factor^[83] although evidence suggested that this ban was often ignored.^[84]

In response to growing concerns over the inappropriate use of journal impact factors in evaluating scientific outputs and scientists themselves, the American Society for Cell Biology together with a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals created the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). Released in May 2013, DORA has garnered support from thousands of individuals and hundreds of institutions,^[28] including in March 2015 the League of European Research Universities (a consortium of 21 of the most renowned research universities in Europe),^[85] who have endorsed the document on the DORA website.

Publishers, even those with high impact factors, also recognised the flaws.^[86] Nature magazine criticised the over-reliance on JIF, pointing not just to its statistical flaws but to negative effects on science: «The resulting pressures and disappointments are nothing but demoralizing, and in badly run labs can encourage sloppy research that, for example, fails to test assumptions thoroughly or to take all the data into account before submitting big claims.»^[87] Various publishers now use a mixture of metrics on their website; the PLOS series of journals does not display the impact factor.^[88] Microsoft Academic took a similar view, stating that h-index, EI/SCI and journal impact factors are not shown because «the research literature has provided abundant evidence that these metrics are at best a rough approximation of research impact and scholarly influence.»^[89]

In 2021, Utrecht University promised to abandon all quantitative bibliometrics, including the impact factor. The university stated that «it has become a very sick model that goes beyond what is really relevant for science and putting science forward».^[90][91] This followed a 2018 decision by the main Dutch funding body for research, NWO, to remove all references to journal impact factors and the h-index in all call texts and application forms.^[92] Utrecht’s decision met with some resistance. An open letter signed by over 150 Dutch academics argued that, while imperfect, the JIF is still useful, and that omitting it «will lead to randomness and a compromising of scientific quality».^[93]

[edit]

Some related metrics, also calculated and published by the same organization, include:

• Cited half-life: the median age of the articles that were cited in Journal Citation Reports each year. For example, if a journal’s half-life in 2005 is 5, that means the citations from 2001 to 2005 are half of all the citations from that journal in 2005, and the other half of the citations precede 2001.^[94]
• Aggregate impact factor for a subject category: it is calculated taking into account the number of citations to all journals in the subject category and the number of articles from all the journals in the subject category.
• Immediacy index: the number of citations the articles in a journal receive in a given year divided by the number of articles published.
• Journal citation indicator (JCI): a JIF that adjusts for scientific field; it is similar to Source Normalized Impact per Paper, calculated based on the Scopus database.^[95] JCI is available for all journals in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS CC) — including the AHCI, ESCI, BCI, CPCI — while JIF is only available for the SCIE and SSCI; however, starting in June 2023, JIF will also be issued for all journals in the WoS CC.^[96]

As with the impact factor, there are some nuances to this: for example, Clarivate excludes certain article types (such as news items, correspondence, and errata) from the denominator.^{[97][98][99][10]}

Other measures of scientific impact[edit]

Additional journal-level metrics are available from other organizations. For example, CiteScore is a metric for serial titles in Scopus launched in December 2016 by Elsevier.^[100][101] While these metrics apply only to journals, there are also author-level metrics, such as the h-index, that apply to individual researchers. In addition, article-level metrics measure impact at an article level instead of journal level.

Other more general alternative metrics, or «altmetrics», that include article views, downloads, or mentions in social media, offer a different perspective on research impact, concentrating more on immediate social impact in and outside academia.^[61][102]

Counterfeit impact factors[edit]

Fake impact factors or bogus impact factors are produced by certain companies or individuals.^[103] According to an article published in the Electronic Physician, these include Global Impact Factor, Citefactor, and Universal Impact Factor.^[103] Jeffrey Beall maintained a list of such misleading metrics.^[104][105] Another deceitful practice is reporting «alternative impact factors», calculated as the average number of citations per article using citation indices other than JCR, even if based on reputable sources such as Google Scholar (e.g., «Google-based Journal Impact Factor»).^[106]

False impact factors are often used by predatory publishers.^[107][108] Consulting Journal Citation Reports’ master journal list can confirm if a publication is indexed by the Journal Citation Reports.^[109] The use of fake impact metrics is considered a red flag.^[110]

See also[edit]

• Author impact factor
• Citation impact
• Goodhart’s law
• Journalology

Notes on alternatives[edit]

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

This article is about a measure of journal influence. For other similar metrics, see Citation impact.

The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as indexed by Clarivate’s Web of Science. As a journal-level metric, it is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field; journals with higher impact factor values are given the status of being more important, or carry more prestige in their respective fields, than those with lower values. While frequently used by universities and funding bodies to decide on promotion and research proposals, it has come under attack for distorting good scientific practices.^[1][2][3]

History[edit]

The impact factor was devised by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia. Impact factors began to be calculated yearly starting from 1975 for journals listed in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). ISI was acquired by Thomson Scientific & Healthcare in 1992,^[4] and became known as Thomson ISI. In 2018, Thomson-Reuters spun off and sold ISI to Onex Corporation and Baring Private Equity Asia.^[5] They founded a new corporation, Clarivate, which is now the publisher of the JCR.^[6]

Calculation[edit]

In any given year, the two-year journal impact factor is the ratio between the number of citations received in that year for publications in that journal that were published in the two preceding years and the total number of «citable items» published in that journal during the two preceding years:^[7][8]

For example, Nature had an impact factor of 41.577 in 2017:^[9]

This means that, on average, its papers published in 2015 and 2016 received roughly 42 citations each in 2017. 2017 impact factors are reported in 2018; they cannot be calculated until all of the 2017 publications have been processed by the indexing agency.

The value of impact factor depends on how to define «citations» and «publications»; the latter are often referred to as «citable items». In current practice, both «citations» and «publications» are defined exclusively by ISI as follows. «Publications» are items that are classed as «article», «review» or «proceedings paper»^[10] in the Web of Science (WoS) database; other items like editorials, corrections, notes, retractions and discussions are excluded. WoS is accessible to all registered users, who can independently verify the number of citable items for a given journal. In contrast, the number of citations is extracted not from the WoS database, but from a dedicated JCR database, which is not accessible to general readers. Hence, the commonly used «JCR Impact Factor» is a proprietary value, which is defined and calculated by ISI and can not be verified by external users.^[11]

New journals, which are indexed from their first published issue, will receive an impact factor after two years of indexing; in this case, the citations to the year prior to volume 1, and the number of articles published in the year prior to volume 1, are known zero values. Journals that are indexed starting with a volume other than the first volume will not get an impact factor until they have been indexed for three years. Occasionally, Journal Citation Reports assigns an impact factor to new journals with less than two years of indexing, based on partial citation data.^[12][13] The calculation always uses two complete and known years of item counts, but for new titles one of the known counts is zero. Annuals and other irregular publications sometimes publish no items in a particular year, affecting the count. The impact factor relates to a specific time period; it is possible to calculate it for any desired period. For example, the JCR also includes a five-year impact factor, which is calculated by dividing the number of citations to the journal in a given year by the number of articles published in that journal in the previous five years.^[14][15]

Use[edit]

While originally invented as a tool to help university librarians to decide which journals to purchase, the impact factor soon became used as a measure for judging academic success. This use of impact factors was summarised by Hoeffel in 1998:^[16]

Impact Factor is not a perfect tool to measure the quality of articles but there is nothing better and it has the advantage of already being in existence and is, therefore, a good technique for scientific evaluation. Experience has shown that in each specialty the best journals are those in which it is most difficult to have an article accepted, and these are the journals that have a high impact factor. Most of these journals existed long before the impact factor was devised. The use of impact factor as a measure of quality is widespread because it fits well with the opinion we have in each field of the best journals in our specialty….In conclusion, prestigious journals publish papers of high level. Therefore, their impact factor is high, and not the contrary.

As impact factors are a journal-level metric, rather than an article- or individual-level metric, this use is controversial. Eugene Garfield, the inventor of the JIF agreed with Hoeffel,^[17] but warned about the «misuse in evaluating individuals» because there is «a wide variation [of citations] from article to article within a single journal».^[18] Despite this warning, the use of the JIF has evolved, playing a key role in the process of assessing individual researchers, their job applications and their funding proposals. In 2005, The Journal of Cell Biology noted that:

Impact factor data … have a strong influence on the scientific community, affecting decisions on where to publish, whom to promote or hire, the success of grant applications, and even salary bonuses.^[19]

More targeted research has begun to provide firm evidence of how deeply the impact factor is embedded within formal and informal research assessment processes. A review in 2019 studied how often the JIF featured in documents related to the review, promotion, and tenure of scientists in US and Canadian universities. It concluded that 40% of universities focussed on academic research specifically mentioned the JIF as part of such review, promotion, and tenure processes.^[20] And a 2017 study of how researchers in the life sciences behave concluded that «everyday decision-making practices as highly governed by pressures to publish in high-impact journals». The deeply embedded nature of such indicators not only effect research assessment, but the more fundamental issue of what research is actually undertaken: «Given the current ways of evaluation and valuing research, risky, lengthy, and unorthodox project rarely take center stage.»^[21]

Criticism[edit]

Numerous critiques have been made regarding the use of impact factors, both in terms of its statistical validity and also of its implications for how science is carried out and assessed.^{[3][22][23][24][25]} A 2007 study noted that the most fundamental flaw is that impact factors present the mean of data that are not normally distributed, and suggested that it would be more appropriate to present the median of these data.^[19] There is also a more general debate on the validity of the impact factor as a measure of journal importance and the effect of policies that editors may adopt to boost their impact factor (perhaps to the detriment of readers and writers). Other criticism focuses on the effect of the impact factor on behavior of scholars, editors and other stakeholders.^[26] Further criticisms argue that emphasis on impact factor results from the negative influence of neoliberal politics on academia. Some of these arguments demand not just replacement of the impact factor with more sophisticated metrics but also discussion on the social value of research assessment and the growing precariousness of scientific careers in higher education.^[27][28]

Inapplicability of impact factor to individuals and between-discipline differences[edit]

It has been stated that impact factors in particular and citation analysis in general are affected by field-dependent factors^[29] which invalidate comparisons not only across disciplines but even within different fields of research of one discipline.^[30] The percentage of total citations occurring in the first two years after publication also varies highly among disciplines from 1–3% in the mathematical and physical sciences to 5–8% in the biological sciences.^[31] Thus impact factors cannot be used to compare journals across disciplines.

Impact factors are sometimes used to evaluate not only the journals but the papers therein, thereby devaluing papers in certain subjects.^[32] In 2004, the Higher Education Funding Council for England was urged by the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee to remind Research Assessment Exercise panels that they are obliged to assess the quality of the content of individual articles, not the reputation of the journal in which they are published.^[33] Other studies have repeatedly stated that impact factor is a metric for journals and should not be used to assess individual researchers or institutions.^[34][35][36]

Questionable editorial policies that affect the impact factor[edit]

Because impact factor is commonly accepted as a proxy for research quality, some journals adopt editorial policies and practices, some acceptable and some of dubious purpose, to increase its impact factor.^[37][38] For example, journals may publish a larger percentage of review articles which generally are cited more than research reports.^[8] Research undertaken in 2020 on dentistry journals concluded that the publication of «systematic reviews have significant effect on the Journal Impact Factor … while papers publishing clinical trials bear no influence on this factor. Greater yearly average of published papers … means a higher impact factor.»^[39]

Journals may also attempt to limit the number of «citable items»—i.e., the denominator of the impact factor equation—either by declining to publish articles that are unlikely to be cited (such as case reports in medical journals) or by altering articles (e.g., by not allowing an abstract or bibliography in hopes that Journal Citation Reports will not deem it a «citable item»). As a result of negotiations over whether items are «citable», impact factor variations of more than 300% have been observed.^[40] Items considered to be uncitable—and thus are not incorporated in impact factor calculations—can, if cited, still enter into the numerator part of the equation despite the ease with which such citations could be excluded. This effect is hard to evaluate, for the distinction between editorial comment and short original articles is not always obvious. For example, letters to the editor may be part of either class.

Another less insidious tactic journals employ is to publish a large portion of its papers, or at least the papers expected to be highly cited, early in the calendar year. This gives those papers more time to gather citations. Several methods, not necessarily with nefarious intent, exist for a journal to cite articles in the same journal which will increase the journal’s impact factor.^[41][42]

Beyond editorial policies that may skew the impact factor, journals can take overt steps to game the system. For example, in 2007, the specialist journal Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica, with an impact factor of 0.66, published an editorial that cited all its articles from 2005 to 2006 in a protest against the «absurd scientific situation in some countries» related to use of the impact factor.^[43] The large number of citations meant that the impact factor for that journal increased to 1.44. As a result of the increase, the journal was not included in the 2008 and 2009 Journal Citation Reports.^[44]

Coercive citation is a practice in which an editor forces an author to add extraneous citations to an article before the journal will agree to publish it, in order to inflate the journal’s impact factor.^[45] A survey published in 2012 indicates that coercive citation has been experienced by one in five researchers working in economics, sociology, psychology, and multiple business disciplines, and it is more common in business and in journals with a lower impact factor.^[46] Editors of leading business journals banded together to disavow the practice.^[47] However, cases of coercive citation have occasionally been reported for other disciplines.^[48]

Assumed correlation between impact factor and quality[edit]

The journal impact factor was originally designed by Eugene Garfield as a metric to help librarians make decisions about which journals were worth indexing, as the JIF aggregates the number of citations to articles published in each journal. Since then, the JIF has become associated as a mark of journal «quality», and gained widespread use for evaluation of research and researchers instead, even at the institutional level. It thus has significant impact on steering research practices and behaviours.^[49][50][51]

By 2010, national and international research funding institutions were already starting to point out that numerical indicators such as the JIF should not be considered as a measure of quality.^{[note 1]} In fact, research was indicating that the JIF is a highly manipulated metric,^[52][53][54] and the justification for its continued widespread use beyond its original narrow purpose seems due to its simplicity (easily calculable and comparable number), rather than any actual relationship to research quality.^[55][56][57]

Empirical evidence shows that the misuse of the JIF—and journal ranking metrics in general—has a number of negative consequences for the scholarly communication system. These include gaps between the reach of a journal and the quality of its individual papers^[25] and insufficient coverage of social sciences and humanities as well as research outputs from across Latin America, Africa, and South-East Asia.^{[citation needed]} Additional drawbacks include the marginalization of research in vernacular languages and on locally relevant topics and inducement to unethical authorship and citation practices. More generally, the impact factors fosters a reputation economy, where scientific success is based on publishing in prestigious journals ahead of actual research qualities such as rigorous methods, replicability and social impact. Using journal prestige and the JIF to cultivate a competition regime in academia has been shown to have deleterious effects on research quality.^[58]

A number of regional and international initiatives are now providing and suggesting alternative research assessment systems, including key documents such as the Leiden Manifesto^{[note 2]} and the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). Plan S calls for a broader adoption and implementation of such initiatives alongside fundamental changes in the scholarly communication system.^{[note 3]} As appropriate measures of quality for authors and research, concepts of research excellence should be remodelled around transparent workflows and accessible research results.^[59][60][61]

JIFs are still regularly used to evaluate research in many countries, which is a problem since a number of issues remain around the opacity of the metric and the fact that it is often negotiated by publishers.^[62][63][19]

Negotiated values[edit]

Results of an impact factor can change dramatically depending on which items are considered as «citable» and therefore included in the denominator.^[64] One notorious example of this occurred in 1988 when it was decided that meeting abstracts published in FASEB Journal would no longer be included in the denominator. The journal’s impact factor jumped from 0.24 in 1988 to 18.3 in 1989.^[65] Publishers routinely discuss with Clarivate how to improve the «accuracy» of their journals’ impact factor and therefore get higher scores.^[40][25]

Such discussions routinely produce «negotiated values» which result in dramatic changes in the observed scores for dozens of journals, sometimes after unrelated events like the purchase by one of the larger publishers.^[66]

Distribution skewness[edit]

Because citation counts have highly skewed distributions,^[24] the mean number of citations is potentially misleading if used to gauge the typical impact of articles in the journal rather than the overall impact of the journal itself.^[68] For example, about 90% of Nature‘s 2004 impact factor was based on only a quarter of its publications. Thus the actual number of citations for a single article in the journal is in most cases much lower than the mean number of citations across articles.^[69] Furthermore, the strength of the relationship between impact factors of journals and the citation rates of the papers therein has been steadily decreasing since articles began to be available digitally.^[70]

The effect of outliers can be seen in the case of the article «A short history of SHELX», which included this sentence: «This paper could serve as a general literature citation when one or more of the open-source SHELX programs (and the Bruker AXS version SHELXTL) are employed in the course of a crystal-structure determination». This article received more than 6,600 citations. As a consequence, the impact factor of the journal Acta Crystallographica Section A rose from 2.051 in 2008 to 49.926 in 2009, more than Nature (at 31.434) and Science (at 28.103).^[71] The second-most cited article in Acta Crystallographica Section A in 2008 had only 28 citations.^[72]

Critics of the JIF state that use of the arithmetic mean in its calculation is problematic because the pattern of citation distribution is skewed^[73] and citation distributions metrics have been proposed as an alternative to impact factors.^[74][75][76]

However, there have also been pleas to take a more nuanced approach to judging the distribution skewness of the impact factor. Waltman and Traag^[who?], in their 2021 paper, ran numerous simulations and concluded that «statistical objections against the use of the IF at the level of individual articles are not convincing», and that «the IF may be a more accurate indicator of the value of an article than the number of citations of the article».^[1]

Lack of reproducibility[edit]

While the underlying mathematical model is publicly known, the dataset which is used to calculate the JIF is not publicly available. This prompted criticism: «Just as scientists would not accept the findings in a scientific paper without seeing the primary data, so should they not rely on Thomson Scientific’s impact factor, which is based on hidden data».^[19] However, a 2019 article demonstrated that «with access to the data and careful cleaning, the JIF can be reproduced», although this required much labour to achieve.^[77] A 2020 research paper went further. It indicated that by querying open access or partly open-access databases, like Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and Scopus, it is possible to calculate approximate impact factors without the need to purchase Web of Science / JCR.^[78]

Broader negative impact on science[edit]

Just as the impact factor has attracted criticism for various immediate problems associated with its application, so has there also been criticism that its application undermines the broader process of science. Research has indicated that bibliometrics figures, particularly the impact factor, decrease the quality of peer review an article receiving,^[79] a reluctance to share data,^[21] decreasing quality of articles,^[80] and a reduced scope in terms of what they can research. «For many researchers the only research questions and projects that appear viable are those that can meet the demand of scoring well in terms of metric performance indicators — and chiefly the journal impact factor.».^[21] Furthermore, the process of publication and science is slowed down — authors automatically try and publish with the journals with the highest impact factor — «as editors and reviewers are tasked with reviewing papers that are not submitted to the most appropriate venues».^[77]

Institutional responses to criticism of the impact factor[edit]

Given the growing criticism and its widespread usage as a means of research assessment, organisations and institutions have begun to take steps to move away from the journal impact factor. In November 2007 the European Association of Science Editors (EASE) issued an official statement recommending «that journal impact factors are used only—and cautiously—for measuring and comparing the influence of entire journals, but not for the assessment of single papers, and certainly not for the assessment of researchers or research programmes».^[23]

In July 2008, the International Council for Science Committee on Freedom and Responsibility in the Conduct of Science issued a «statement on publication practices and indices and the role of peer review in research assessment», suggesting many possible solutions—e.g., considering a limit number of publications per year to be taken into consideration for each scientist, or even penalising scientists for an excessive number of publications per year—e.g., more than 20.^[81]

In February 2010, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) published new guidelines to reduce the number of publications that could be submitted when applying for funding: «The focus has not been on what research someone has done but rather how many papers have been published and where.» They noted that for decisions concerning «performance-based funding allocations, postdoctoral qualifications, appointments, or reviewing funding proposals, [where] increasing importance has been given to numerical indicators such as the h-index and the impact factor».^[82] The UK’s Research Assessment Exercise for 2014 also banned the journal impact factor^[83] although evidence suggested that this ban was often ignored.^[84]

In response to growing concerns over the inappropriate use of journal impact factors in evaluating scientific outputs and scientists themselves, the American Society for Cell Biology together with a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals created the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). Released in May 2013, DORA has garnered support from thousands of individuals and hundreds of institutions,^[28] including in March 2015 the League of European Research Universities (a consortium of 21 of the most renowned research universities in Europe),^[85] who have endorsed the document on the DORA website.

Publishers, even those with high impact factors, also recognised the flaws.^[86] Nature magazine criticised the over-reliance on JIF, pointing not just to its statistical flaws but to negative effects on science: «The resulting pressures and disappointments are nothing but demoralizing, and in badly run labs can encourage sloppy research that, for example, fails to test assumptions thoroughly or to take all the data into account before submitting big claims.»^[87] Various publishers now use a mixture of metrics on their website; the PLOS series of journals does not display the impact factor.^[88] Microsoft Academic took a similar view, stating that h-index, EI/SCI and journal impact factors are not shown because «the research literature has provided abundant evidence that these metrics are at best a rough approximation of research impact and scholarly influence.»^[89]

In 2021, Utrecht University promised to abandon all quantitative bibliometrics, including the impact factor. The university stated that «it has become a very sick model that goes beyond what is really relevant for science and putting science forward».^[90][91] This followed a 2018 decision by the main Dutch funding body for research, NWO, to remove all references to journal impact factors and the h-index in all call texts and application forms.^[92] Utrecht’s decision met with some resistance. An open letter signed by over 150 Dutch academics argued that, while imperfect, the JIF is still useful, and that omitting it «will lead to randomness and a compromising of scientific quality».^[93]

[edit]

Some related metrics, also calculated and published by the same organization, include:

• Cited half-life: the median age of the articles that were cited in Journal Citation Reports each year. For example, if a journal’s half-life in 2005 is 5, that means the citations from 2001 to 2005 are half of all the citations from that journal in 2005, and the other half of the citations precede 2001.^[94]
• Aggregate impact factor for a subject category: it is calculated taking into account the number of citations to all journals in the subject category and the number of articles from all the journals in the subject category.
• Immediacy index: the number of citations the articles in a journal receive in a given year divided by the number of articles published.
• Journal citation indicator (JCI): a JIF that adjusts for scientific field; it is similar to Source Normalized Impact per Paper, calculated based on the Scopus database.^[95] JCI is available for all journals in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS CC) — including the AHCI, ESCI, BCI, CPCI — while JIF is only available for the SCIE and SSCI; however, starting in June 2023, JIF will also be issued for all journals in the WoS CC.^[96]

As with the impact factor, there are some nuances to this: for example, Clarivate excludes certain article types (such as news items, correspondence, and errata) from the denominator.^{[97][98][99][10]}

Other measures of scientific impact[edit]

Additional journal-level metrics are available from other organizations. For example, CiteScore is a metric for serial titles in Scopus launched in December 2016 by Elsevier.^[100][101] While these metrics apply only to journals, there are also author-level metrics, such as the h-index, that apply to individual researchers. In addition, article-level metrics measure impact at an article level instead of journal level.

Other more general alternative metrics, or «altmetrics», that include article views, downloads, or mentions in social media, offer a different perspective on research impact, concentrating more on immediate social impact in and outside academia.^[61][102]

Counterfeit impact factors[edit]

Fake impact factors or bogus impact factors are produced by certain companies or individuals.^[103] According to an article published in the Electronic Physician, these include Global Impact Factor, Citefactor, and Universal Impact Factor.^[103] Jeffrey Beall maintained a list of such misleading metrics.^[104][105] Another deceitful practice is reporting «alternative impact factors», calculated as the average number of citations per article using citation indices other than JCR, even if based on reputable sources such as Google Scholar (e.g., «Google-based Journal Impact Factor»).^[106]

False impact factors are often used by predatory publishers.^[107][108] Consulting Journal Citation Reports’ master journal list can confirm if a publication is indexed by the Journal Citation Reports.^[109] The use of fake impact metrics is considered a red flag.^[110]

See also[edit]

• Author impact factor
• Citation impact
• Goodhart’s law
• Journalology

Notes on alternatives[edit]

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

Ежегодно официальная наука и исследователи публикуют большое число материалов. Изданий, в которых такие материалы размещаются, также немало. Подбирая журнал для своего материала, автор учитывает различные критерии: тематику, сроки опубликования, необходимость оплаты публикационных услуг и т.п.

А как выявить значимость журнала для науки? Много ли читателей ознакомится с материалом, опубликованном в определенном журнале, и, возможно, процитирует его?

В качестве ранжирования издания по значимости для представителей науки используют разные показатели, которые называют импакт-факторами (ИФ), также они носят название факторов влияния. Импакт-фактор журнала – это один из основных критериев, по которому выявляют полезность журнала и размещенных в нем материалов. ИФ часто помогает принимать решение о финансовой поддержке научных изысканий, приеме работников на научную должность и др. ИФ также берут в расчет при подборке материалов для подписки в библиотеках научного направления.

Что из себя представляет ИФ, как выявить его, детальнее, написано в нашем материале.

1. Импакт-фактор журнала – что это, и как его узнать?

ИФ является наиболее значимым параметром научного журнала, выражается он в виде числа и отражает значимость конкретного издания. Ввести ИФ в 50-х годах прошлого века предложили сотрудники WoS, США. И поныне данный индекс применяется научными учреждениями для определения степени важности издания.

В любом информационно-научном учреждении есть собственный способ определения ИФ; такая методика применима для выявления ИФ тех изданий, которые включены в базу данных организации. Однако традиционно учитывают ИФ WoS, за который принимается число ссылок за данный год на материалы, размещенные в журнале на протяжении прошедших двух или пяти лет, разделенное на итоговое число размещенных за данное время статей. Например:

ИФ 2018 = A/B.

Здесь A – число статей, процитированных за 2018 г. Учитываются те материалы, которые были размещены за прошлый период (соответственно 2 или 5 лет – либо с 2016 по 2017 гг., либо с 2013 по 2017 гг. соответственно).

B является совокупным числом всех материалов за рассматриваемый период.

Именно подобным методом выявляется ИФ журналов в информационной базе WoS. В итоге определенный ИФ ежегодно отражается в отчетном материале, сформированном Journal Citation Reports, который размещен на площадке аналитической компании Clarivate Analytics. Каким образом вычисляется ИФ издания в WoS, будет написано ниже.

2. Определяем ИФ в РИНЦ

Подобным образом вычисляется ИФ в РИНЦ, однако такой ИФ отличается от определяемого в WoS, поскольку первый выявляется лишь для отечественных научных изданий, зарубежных журналов на русском языке, а также для изданий, лицензированных порталом eLIBRARY.RU.

Определяя ИФ для РИНЦ, к совокупному числу всех материалов относят научные материалы исследовательского, обзорного толка, а также краткие сообщения. Кроме того, ИФ для РИНЦ присутствует в двух вариациях – как с учетом самоцитирования, так и без.

Расчет ИФ для РИНЦ производится на eLIBRARY.ru (Навигатор –> Каталог журналов).

В этом каталоге присутствуют не только все индексированные РИНЦ материалы, но и издания, исключенные из индексации. Параметр включения/выключения необходимости индексирования находится в выпадающем списке «Сведения о включении в РИНЦ». После этого материалы можно найти нажатием на кнопку «Поиск».

В найденном списке напротив каждого названия справа размещена иконка с диаграммой, при нажатии на нее будет показана детальная информация о журнале, а также его характеристики в течение прошедших двух периодов (соответственно, два года и пять лет).

3. Определяем ИФ в Scopus?

Информационная база Scopus индексирует рейтинг материалов по параметру SCImago Journal Rank (краткое обозначение – SJR), а также по вспомогательным индексам SNIP и CiteScore. Данные индексы в открытом виде присутствуют на //www.scopus.com/sources.

1) SJR предложили в самом начале 21 века сотрудники университета Гранады (научная группа SCImago), поддерживаемые Elsevier (издательская организация). Данный параметр отражает взвешенное число цитат, полученных серией опубликованных материалов. Взвешенный параметр цитирования определяется сферой знаний и степенью значимости цитирующего периодического журнала.

2) CiteScore – параметр, который равен числу процитированных в течение года документов, размещенных в издании в течение прошлых 3 лет, разделенному на число документов, индексированных в Scopus и размещенных за тот же период.

3) Source Normalized Impact Per Paper представляет собой параметр цитируемости (краткое обозначение – SNIP), который, в отличие от обозначенных выше индексов, может сопоставлять материалы различных тем. Этот критерий принимает в расчет ссылки на материалы, размещенные за прошлые 3 года (притом учитываются только ссылки настоящего года). Также берется в расчет регулярность цитирования, степень воздействия цитаты и проанализированная литература в данной научной сфере.

4. Определяем ИФ в WoS

JCR – индикатор, активно использующийся для выявления квартиля (см. далее) журналов в WoS. Указанный ИФ учитывает число ссылок за год на материалы, размещенные в конкретном издании за прошедшие 2 года. Этот индекс позволяет сравнить степень важности журналов одной научной сферы. Притом JCR не применяется для гуманитарных областей.

Чтобы отыскать материалы в WoS, потребуется пользовательская регистрация на ресурсе www.webofknowledge.com, хотя она доступна лишь при помощи ПК учреждения, обладающего необходимым доступом к информационной базе.

Однако по завершении регистрации в базу можно попасть с любого ПК.

В поисковую строку потребуется ввести наименование журнала, поставить в выпадающем списке справа значение «Название издания», после чего щелкнуть на «Поиск». Для примера введем «Nature»:

Система отобразит перечень статей журнала:

Затем необходимо щелкнуть на ссылке журнала, в открывшемся окне можно увидеть значение ИФ за прошлый учитываемый год и за прошедшие 5 лет:

5. Важные особенности ИФ, о которых нужно знать

 Несмотря на то, что импакт-фактор широко используется в качестве наукометрического показателя для оценки журналов, у него есть три важные особенности:

1) Формальное число цитирований не всегда связано с качеством научных работ.

2) Не корректно сравнивать показатели журналов из разных областей науки, поскольку у них традиционно может быть различная частота публикации результатов. У журналов по быстроразвивающимся практическим наукам (например, медицине, биологии), в которых частота публикации работ выше, импакт-фактор в разы больше чем у журналов по точным наукам (математике, физике).

3) Для оценки лучше использовать импакт-фактор за 5-летний период, поскольку цитирования начинаются не сразу после опубликования, а, как правило, с задержкой в несколько лет, а в журналах с длительным процессом публикации статьи авторы могут ссылаться уже на работы, не попадающие в 2-летний интервал.

6. Квартиль журнала – что это, и каким образом определить данный параметр?

Поскольку рейтинги журналов составляются в разных информационных базах по своим методикам, то для удобства оценки значимости издания можно использовать т. н. квартиль (Quartile). Другое название – четверть. Она представляет собой оценку научного издания по уровню цитируемости, всего таких уровней существует четыре – от Q1 до Q4.

Чтобы узнать квартиль издания в рамках узкой научной области, необходимо выполнить ранжирование соответствующего индекса по убыванию. Скажем, квартиль журналов информационной базы WoS, куда входит порядка 12500 материалов, вычисляется с применением JCR, а в отношении к Scopus, который включает примерно 21000 материалов, используется SJR.

Далее сформированный список разделяют на четыре равнозначные части, в результате каждое издание будет содержаться в каком-либо из квартилей. При этом Q1 является наиболее авторитетным признаком важности, а Q4, напротив, наиболее низким.

Разбиение по Quartile позволяет максимально объективно определить степень значимости научного издания независимо от научной области. Обычно самые авторитетные журналы характеризуются квартилями Q1, Q2, однако и в Q3, Q4 попадает достаточное число хороших изданий.

Определение Quartile журнала на основании SJR. Для этого следует зайти по адресу //www.scimagojr.com, войти в «Journal Rankings». В результате отобразится перечень журналов с разными характеристиками, включая квартиль:

Определение Quartile журнала на основании JCR. Для этого нужно зайти по адресу www.webofknowledge.com, затем, по аналогии с инструкцией предыдущего раздела, выполнить те же действия:

Надо иметь в виду, что один и тот же журнал может входить в несколько тематических разделов (около 250 в WoS и 350 в Scopus). Иначе говоря, одно издание может принадлежать различным квартилям.

Заключение

Мы узнали, что импакт-фактор журнала – это один из наиболее значимых наукометрических характеристик журнала. Надо понимать, что ИФ отражает формальную оценку и не учитывает качество научных работ. А при сравнении журналов лучше смотреть показатели за более продолжительный (5-летний) срок.

На вопрос «импакт-фактор журнала – как узнать?», мы дали 3 ответа:

— ИФ в базе РИНЦ определяется для отечественных научных изданий и лишь некоторых иностранных журналов. Узнать его можно, пройдя по адресу eLIBRARY.ru (научная библиотека).

— ИФ Scopus – это показатель SJR, который размещен по адресу //www.scopus.com/sources в свободном доступе и определяется для иностранных журналов (порядка 21000 изданий).

— ИФ WoS – это индикатор JCR, который определяется для иностранных журналов и размещается в отчете «Journal Citation Reports»; он располагается по адресу www.webofknowledge.com, но доступ к нему есть только у пользователей организаций с соответствующей подпиской.

Не забывайте также, что SJR и JCR вычисляются исключительно для журналов, попавших в информационные базы не менее 2 лет назад (Scopus) и не менее 4 лет назад (WoS), поскольку более молодые издания еще не проиндексированы.

— Для сравнения степени значимости журналов из различных научных сфер лучше использовать не ИФ, а Quartile, который также определяется по базам Scopus и WoS и размещается на их сайтах.

А какими наукометрическими показателями чаще пользуетесь вы для оценки журналов?

Если вы используете другие показатели, пишите их в комментариях, будет интересно с ними ознакомиться.

 

Импакт фактор журнала: как узнать

Определяющим критерием важности научных журналов в мире современной науки является импакт фактор журнала. Количество публикаций ежедневно увеличивается, как в отечественной, так и зарубежной литературе. На какую периодику подписаться, где опубликованные исследования наиболее ценны, как повысить авторитетность или найти полезную информацию для собственной статьи? Импакт фактор – наукометрический инструмент, позволяющий определить совокупные показатели не только значимости издаваемого журнала, но и актуальности и продуктивность научной деятельности ученого или организации.

Что такое импакт фактор журнала

Импакт фактор журнала (impact factor, ИФ, IF) – численный показатель значимости и популярности периодического издания. Этот механизм был применен впервые в 60 годах 20 века в США. Специалисты Института информации предложили оценивать качество периодики по количественной характеристике, а именно, по числу цитирований или ссылок на статьи в данном журнале.

С тех пор учебная организация, переименованная в Thomson Scientific (поскольку в 1992 г выкуплена холдингом Thomson), ежегодно высчитывает IF. Публикуются результаты в Journal Citation Report.

Основатель классической методики расчета IF, он же и создатель аналитической IT-площадки Web of Science, где можно посмотреть различные публикации гуманитарных и технических наук, найти сведения о наукометрических параметрах любого издания или отдельной статьи

Web of Science – не единственная платформа для расчета коэффициента цитирования публикаций. В России это площадка – elibrary. А IF – не единичный критерий при выборе качественного издания, но один из значимых в современной науке.

Как рассчитывается импакт фактор журнала

Методика основана на расчетах по ссылкам на журнал, изданным в нем публикации. Существуют различные подходы в расчете импакт фактор журнала: за два, три, пять предыдущих лет. Одни научные организации используют классические методы подсчета, другие – определенные самостоятельно разработанные способы.

Как именно рассчитывается импакт фактор журнала? Классическая методика популярности периодического издания:

ИФ 2017г = a/b, где

a – число цитируемых в 2017 г статей, опубликованных за предыдущий условный период (2 или 5 лет) – 2015-2016 или 2012-2016гг,

b – совокупное число всех публикаций за тот же условный период.

Т.е., ИФ рассчитывается за год цитирования, следующий за определенным сроком публикаций. Статьи, вышедшие за 2 последних года, в подсчете IF не участвуют

Как узнать импакт фактор журнала

Поскольку каждая информационно-аналитическая IT-платформа используют свои наукометрические инструменты, то ИФ можно узнать на официальных сайтах известных международных баз данных, где эти издания индексированы, в том числе российского индекса научного цитирования (РИНЦ).

Список популярных рейтинговых систем в России:

Единой базы impact factor, где можно посмотреть рейтинги одного издания от всех известных платформ – нет.

Как узнать импакт фактор журнала РИНЦ

РИНЦ – отечественная система и база данных цитирования фундаментальных, академических и прикладных исследований. На сегодняшний момент в архиве РИНЦ находится более 12 млн различных статей и публикаций.
База РИНЦ рассчитана на бесплатный свободный доступ.

IF в РИНЦ определяется по стандартной методике Thompson Reuters за 2 года или 5 лет. Большой срок связан с длительной процедуры выпуска: вошедшая в публицистический список статья, может «пылится на полке» еще около года.

Перечень периодики, где рассчитывается российский индекс импакт фактор:

Узнать ИФ в РИНЦ можно на сервере elibrary, воспользовавшись указателем «каталог журналов» на навигаторе сайта (рис.1).

Рисунок 1 – Навигатор, Каталог

Далее находим искомый журнал и нажимаем на цветной значок (рис.2).

Рисунок 2 – Поиск

После нескольких секунд появляется совокупный анализ общих показателей и показателей по годам (рис.3). На странице можно посмотреть как двухлетний, так и пятилетний импакт фактор.

Рисунок 3 – Импакт фактор

Как посмотреть импакт фактор журнала в web of science 

Web of Science (WoS) – самая известная и популярная зарубежная поисковая аналитическая платформа и база данных различных гуманитарных и естественнонаучных публикаций, преимущественно англоязычных.

Отличие от отечественной РИНЦ в том, что свободного доступа в WoS не предусмотрено. Узнать рейтинг той или иной периодики без регистрации в Journal Citation Reports невозможно, будет доступен только квартиль (параметр цитируемости, коррелирующий с импакт фактором).

Компания Clarivate Analytics ежегодно выпускает отчет (Journal Citation Reports (JCR)) об импакт факторе, на данный момент доступен отчет за 2019 год 

Посмотреть ИФ можно через
сайт.

Рейтинг SJR журнала в Scopus

Scopus – одна из крупнейших реферативных площадок, база данных которых уже превышает 20 тысяч периодических изданий.
Официальный сайт на русском языке. Получить доступ к рейтингу периодики можно только после регистрации на Elsevier.

Scopus рассчитывает показатель  CiteScore, который рассчитывается за 3 года. 

Посмотреть его можно тут: https://www.scopus.com/sources 
Вбиваем ISSN журнала

В результатах смотрим 3-х летний ИФ Scopus (CiteScore как они его называют)

У этого журнала он равен 0,15. Это довольно низкий показатель. Если нужно более подробная информация, то надо обратиться к сайту: https://www.scimagojr.com

Для анализа значимости и популярности издания были разработаны похожие критерии, один из которых – SCImago Journal Rank (SJR). SJR рассчитывается на основе данных базы цитирования Scopus. По содержанию SJR идентичен импакт фактору, через количество цитирования он показывает престиж периодики. Полезно посмотреть исторические данные по квартилям или SJR, чтобы понимать куда движется журнал и не исключат ли его из индекса в ближайшее время.

Тут мы видим вполне нормальную картинку, журнал медленно растет в качестве.

Данные по квартилям нам говорят, что это не самый престижный журнал, все время находится в четвертом квартиле.

Рейтинг журнала в Google Scholar

Google Scholar (Академия Гугл) – поисковая система по научным публикациям различных дисциплин. Расположена Академия на абсолютно бесплатной основе. 

Отличие от предыдущих площадок в том, что это не совокупность данных, а система поиска по всем доступным источникам (ссылка может быть не только на саму публикацию, но и на ее описание).

Задав в поисковую строку, можно найти целый список различных рейтингов:

Для журнала предусмотрены показатели:

Impact factor – современный механизм для оценки, как значимости и популярности периодического издания, так и его ценности для научного сообщества. Понимание значимости импакт фактор позволит соискателям не ошибиться в выборе журналов для публикации своих статей, а также увеличивает шансы на получение ученых степеней.

Рейтинг журналов по импакт фактору

Название журнала	База данных	Импакт-фактор
Plos One	Web of Science	2.740
Nanoscale	Scopus	11.3
Engineering Procedia	Scopus	2.7
Key Engineering Materials	Scopus	0.8
Iop conference series materials science and engineering	Scopus	0.6
Tetrahedron letters	Web of Science	2.275
Arkivoc	Web of Science	1.003
Russian journal of organic chemistry	Web of Science	0.624
Journal of engineering physics and thermophysics	Scopus	1.2
Journal of environmental chemical engineering	Web of Science	4.300
Journal of alloys and compounds	Web of Science	4.650
Journal of physical chemistry	Web of Science	6.710
Scientific reports	Web of Science	3.998
Archives of Medical Research	Scopus	3.3
Journal of physics conference series	Scopus	0.7
Applied surface science	Web of Science	6.182
Nature	Web of Science	42.778
Inorganic materials applied research	Scopus	0.9
Journal of applied physics	Web of Science	2.286
Nano letters	Web of Science	11.238
Science	Web of Science	41.845
Nanotechnologies in russia	Scopus	1.4
International journal of photoenergy	Web of Science	1.880
Journal of magnetism and magnetic materials	Web of Science	2.717
Aip conference proceedings	Scopus	0.6
Bionanoscience	Scopus	2.0
Applied physics letters	Web of Science	3.597
Mendeleev communications	Web of Science	1.694
Journal of luminescence	Web of Science	3.280
Physical review E	Web of Science	2.296
Современные технологии в медицине	РИНЦ	0,797
Геология и геофизика	РИНЦ	0,762
Georgian medical news	Scopus	0.3
Химическая физика	РИНЦ	0.434
Acta naturae	Web of Science	1.360
Proceedings of spie	Scopus	1.0
Фундаментальные исследования	РИНЦ	0.639
Балтийский гуманитарный журнал	РИНЦ	1.855
Экономика и предпринимательство	РИНЦ	0.309
Российский биотерапевтический	РИНЦ	0.802
Органической химии	РИНЦ	0.381
Доклады академии наук	РИНЦ	0.515
Известия ран серия физическая	РИНЦ	0.221
Медицинский вестник северного Кавказа	РИНЦ	0.956
Far eastern entomologist	Scopus	1.0
Успехи геронтологии	РИНЦ	0.888
Вестник рамн	РИНЦ	1.271
Мелиорация и водное хозяйство	РИНЦ	0.727
Российский медицинский журнал	РИНЦ	0.509
Медицинский алфавит	РИНЦ	0.336
Биофизика журнал	РИНЦ	0.528
Письма в жэтф	РИНЦ	0.465
Успехи химии	РИНЦ	3.068
Journal of machinery manufacture and reliability	Scopus	1.1
Известия ран серия физическая	РИНЦ	0.221
Soil mechanics and foundation engineering	Scopus	0.9
ARPN journal of engineering and applied sciences	Scopus	1.2

Как поднять импакт фактор журнала

При расчете импакт-фактора большое значение играет охватываемость цитированием публикуемого материала. Таким образом, чем меньше статей публикуется в одном номере и чем меньше номеров издается в год, тем проще обеспечить высокие показатели импакт-фактора журнала. В информационном обществе «толстые» научные журналы скорее отпугивают, нежели привлекают страдающих нехваткой времени и дефицитом внимания читателей – и, следовательно, снижается цитабельность статей в таких изданиях.

Совокупный импакт фактор журналов в которых опубликованы статьи организации

Совокупный импакт-фактор журналов, в которых опубликованы статьи организации, равен сумме импакт-факторов тех журналов, в которых публиковались статьи организации. Если есть несколько статей из одного и того же журнала – соответствующее слагаемое умножается на число статей, вышедших в этом журнале.

Задача: узнать импакт-фактор любого журнала в eLIBRARY.RU (РИНЦ), Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar.

Краткое содержание статьи (нажмите пункт для быстрого перехода):

1. Импакт-фактор журнала в РИНЦ
2. Рейтинг SJRank журнала в Scopus
3. Импакт-фактор журнала в Web of Science
4. Рейтинг журнала в Google Scholar

1. Импакт-фактор журнала в РИНЦ

Импакт-фактор в РИНЦ рассчитывается только для научных журналов, имеющих лицензионное соглашение с НЭБ на передачу данных в РИНЦ.

Для переводных российских журналов импакт-фактор рассчитывается только для оригинальной русской версии. При расчете импакт-фактора журнала учитываются только научные статьи, обзорные статьи и краткие сообщения (это относится как к цитирующим, так и к цитируемым статьям).

На главной странице eLIBRARY.RU находим блок слева “Навигатор“. Выбираем пункт “Каталог журналов“.

В каталоге журналов можно посмотреть все журналы, индексируемые РИНЦ, а также перечень исключенных журналов, для этого достаточно настроить поиск в блоке “Сведения о включении в РИНЦ”. Стрелкой на рисунке внизу указано, где это можно отметить. Далее нажимаем “Поиск”.

Нажав кнопку Поиск, мы получаем результат. Журнал также можно искать по названию ISSN и т.п. Мы же ограничимся рейтингом и добавим к сортировке “По рейтингу science index”. В результате поиска нам выходят все журналы, нажав на диаграмму на рисунке ниже указана стрелкой, мы увидим статистику по журналу.

Также посмотрим ниже Импакт-фактор журнала.

Таким образом, пятилетний импакт-фактор журнала равен 5,36.

2. Рейтинг SJR журнала в Scopus

Scopus  не рассматривает импакт-фактор журнала. Он формирует другие показатели:

• CiteScore. Показатель характеризует среднее количество цитат, полученных каждым документом, опубликованным в периодическом издании.
• Рейтинг SCImago Journal Rank. Оценивает взвешенное количество цитат, полученных серией публикаций. Взвешенная оценка цитирования зависит от отрасли знаний и престижности (SJR) цитирующего периодического издания.
• Нормированный по источникам уровень цитируемости статьи (SNIP). Характеризует количество фактически полученных цитат в отношении к ожидаемому количеству для отрасли знаний серии публикаций.

Для того, чтобы посмотреть рейтинги журналов достаточно перейти на сайт Journal Metrics (https://journalmetrics.scopus.com), либо посмотреть на самом сайте Scopus. Данная информация открыта для пользователя.

Для того чтобы посмотреть сведения о журналах в Scopus. Заходим на сайт: https://www.scopus.com , выбираем “Источники” в верхнем меню.

Далее можно выбрать журнал По названию, по Отраслям знаний.

Похожая схема отображения в Journal Metrics (https://journalmetrics.scopus.com).

Далее заходим на страницу журнала, там отображены те же сведения, а также перечень статей.

Для того, чтобы отобрать журналы по рейтингу существует еще один инструмент на основе Scopus данных SJR (Scimago Journal & Country Rank). Для того чтобы воспользоваться им, перейдите на сайт http://www.scimagojr.com меню “Journal Rankings”. В данном случае по каждому журналу представлены следующие показатели:

Из них самый интересный SJR и квартиль журнала. Можно выбирать источники по отраслям знаний, по типу издания, по стране издания, по открытому доступу. Ниже приведен пример сортировки по открытому доступу и отрасли Agricultural and Biological Sciences.

Таким образом, Scopus не ориентируется на показатель импакт-фактора журнала, все журналы разбиваются на квартили и ранги.

3. Импакт-фактор журнала в Web of Science

Поиск по Web of Science не возможен без регистрации, в открытом доступе данных нет. Заходим по своему логину и паролю на сайт http://webofscience.com/

Если у вашей организации не подключен Journal Citation Reports, то импакт-фактор журнала в Web of Science вы не увидите, только Квартиль. Однако Web of Science считает импакт-фактор.

Итак, заходим на страницу поиска, выбираем статьи по теме.

Дополнительно выбираем в параметрах статьи последнего или предпоследнего года, потому что старые журналы могут уже исключить.

Отбираем только интересующие нас категории статей.

Для этого необходимо уточнить поиск и нажать на дополнительные параметры, на новой странице выделить галочками нужные категории и нажать “Уточнить”.

В итоге мы получаем подборку статей по нужной тематике. Нажимаем на активную ссылку журнала.

В появившемся окне мы видим краткие сведения о журнале  и квартиль. К сожалению в нашей версии подписки нет возможности посмотреть импакт-фактор.

4. Рейтинг журнала в Google Scholar

В Google Scholar или Google Академии нет профилей журналов. Есть только рейтинг популярности журналов. Для этого достаточно перейти по ссылке: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=ru

Выберем русский язык и получаем результат.

Журналы оцениваются по показателям:

• H5-индекс – индекс Хирша для статей, опубликованных за последние 5 полных лет. H5-индекс равен h, если каждая из h статей, опубликованных в 2012–2016 гг., процитирована по крайней мере h раз.
• H5-медиана представляет собой медиану числа цитирований публикаций, которые входят в h5-индекс.