Impact Factor - What is it?; Why use it?
The 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.
How Impact Factor is Calculated?
The calculation is based on a two-year period and involves dividing the number of times articles were cited by the number of articles that are citable.
Calculation of 2010 IF of a journal:
The General Impact Factor (GIF) provides quantitative and qualitative ranking, evaluating the journals for evaluation and excellence. This factor is used for evaluating the prestige of journals. The evaluation is carried out by considering the factors like peer review originality, scientific quality, technical editing quality, editorial quality and regularity and other factors.
The General Impact Factor (GIF) is a measure reflecting the average number of citations to articles published in journals, books, patent document, thesis, project reports, news papers, conference/ seminar proceedings, documents published in internet, notes and any other approved documents. It is measure the relative importance of a journal within its field, with journals of higher journal impact factors deemed to be more important than those with lower ones. Journal Impact factors are calculated in yearly/half- yearly/ Quarterly/Monthly for those journals that are indexed in Journal Reference Reports (JRR).
The impact factor (IF) of an academic journal is a measure reflecting the average number of citations to recent articles published in the journal. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field, with journals with higher impact factors deemed to be more important than those with lower ones. The impact factor was devised by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information. The impact factor is highly dependent on the academic discipline, possibly on the speed with which papers get cited in a field. The percentage of total citations occurring in the first two years after publication varies highly among disciplines from 1–3% in the mathematical and physical sciences to 5–8% in the biological sciences. Thus impact factors cannot be used to compare journals across disciplines. The impact factor is based on the arithmetic mean number of citations per paper, yet citation counts follow a and therefore the arithmetic mean is a statistically inappropriate measure.
Scopus Preview metrics enrich the evaluation of serial titles and provide transparent data to help you measure the citation impact for journals, book series, conference proceedings and trade journals. This comprehensive, clear and current system of metrics for analysis can be accessed for free on Scopus.
Powered by Scopus with active titles from 7000+ publishers across 334 disciplines, CiteScore provides transparent metrics that enable well-informed publishing strategy, library collection development and benchmarking of journal performance. More titles are being frequently added and tracked, with the freely available metrics.
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Adapted from University Libraries--University of Illnois http://researchguides.uic.edu/c.php?g=252603&p=1684024
