Impact factor

Impact factor (IF) is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. It is used to measure the importance or rank of a journal by calculating the times it's articles are cited.

Overview

The impact factor was devised by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Impact factors are calculated yearly starting from 1975 for those journals that are indexed in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR).

Calculation

In any given year, the impact factor of a journal is the number of citations, received in that year, of articles published in that journal during the two preceding years, divided by the total number of articles published in that journal during the two preceding years.

Criticisms

While the impact factor can be used to compare scientific journals within a certain field, it has been criticized for a number of reasons. It is highly dependent on the field: fields with larger number of articles get higher impact factors, not necessarily reflecting the real quality of a journal.

See also

• Scientific journal
• Academic journal
• Citation index
• Eugene Garfield
• Institute for Scientific Information
• Journal Citation Reports

References

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