Crucial Facts About The Impact Factor That All Research Authors Should Be Aware . Read this PDF for List of academic journals by Impact factor. Visit us- https://bit.ly/3NqnJGZ

1. Choose List of academic journals by
Impact factor
At Its Core, What Is The Impact Factor Value?
● The impact factor (IF) is utilized as an indicator of the importance of a
journal in its discipline.
● It was first developed by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute
for Scientific Information.
● Despite the fact that this metric is widely used by institutions and
clinicians, people have a common misconception regarding the
calculation method of a journal’s impact factor value, its meaning,
and how it can be used.
● A journal’s IF is not associated with factors such as the quality of the
peer review process and the quality of the journal’s content but is a
measure that exhibits the average citation count of articles published
in –
○ journals,
○ books,
○ theses,
○ project reports,
○ conference/seminar proceedings,
○ documents published on the Internet,
○ notes and any other approved document.
● The impact factor is commonly used to assess the relative
importance of a journal in its discipline and to estimate the frequency
with which the “average article” of a journal has been cited during a
given period.
● Journals that publish more review articles will be recognized as “high
impact factors journals“.
● Journals with higher IFs are thought to be more important than those
with lower FIs.
● According to Eugene Garfield, the impact factor simply is an
indication of the capacity of journals and publishers to attract the best
articles available.

2. ● The impact factor can be calculated after the completion of a
minimum of three years of publication; for this reason, a journal’s IF
value cannot be calculated for new journals.
● A journal with the highest impact factor value is the one that
published the most cited articles over a two-year period.
● The IF only applies to journals, not to individual articles or individual
scientists, unlike the “H-index”.
● The relative number of citations an individual paper receives is best
assessed as “citation impact”.
● In any given year, the IF of a journal is the average number of
citations received per article published in this journal during the
previous two years.
● IFs are calculated annually by Thomson Scientific for the journals it
indexes and are published in Journal Citation Reports.
How Is The IF Value Of A Journal Typically Measured & Calculated
● The calculated and published values ​
​
are as follows.
● The values ​
​
are calculated by the Institute for Scientific Information for
the journals it indexes; impact factors, and immediacy indices are
published yearly in the Journal Citation Reports –
● The Impact Factor Value
○ This is a general measure of the impact of the citation;
calculated over a two-year period.
● The Immediacy Index Value
○ The number of citations a journal’s articles gets in a given
year is divided by the number of articles published.
○ An immediacy index is a measure of the timeliness and
urgency of work published in a scientific journal.
● The Cited Half-Life Value
○ The median age of articles that received citations in Journal
Citation Reports each year.
○ For example, if the half-life of a journal in 2025 will be five,
that means the citations from 2021 to 2025 represent half of
all citations for that journal in 2025, and the other half of the
citations predate 2021.
● The Aggregate Impact Factor Value For A Subject Category

3. ○ It is measured by taking into account the number of citations
of all the journals in a specific subject and the number of
articles of all the journals of the subject category.
These measures apply only to journals, not to individual papers/articles or
individual researchers (unlike, for instance, the H-index). The relative number
of citations an individual paper/article receives is considered the citation
impact.
● The Calculation
○ A journal’s impact factor is calculated over a two-year
period.
○ One can think of this as the average number of citations in a
given year to articles in a journal that were published in the
previous two years.
○ For example, a journal’s 2023 impact factor would be
calculated as follows –
■ A = number of times articles published in
2021-2022 were cited in journals indexed in 2023
■ B = number of “citable items” (usually articles,
reviews, reviews, or notes; not editorials and letters
to the editor) published in 2021-2022
■ Impact factor 2023 = A/B
■ (Note that the 2023 impact factor will actually be
published in 2024, as it cannot be calculated until
all 2023 publications are received)
■ An easy way of comprehending this is to imagine
that a journal that’s cited once, on average, for
every article published, has an impact factor value
of 1 in the above expression.
● There are a few nuances to this – ISI excludes certain types of
articles (called “front-matter” such as news articles, correspondence,
and errata) from the denominator.
● Thomson Scientific doesn’t have a hard and fast rule for what types
of articles are considered “citable” and what front-line articles.
● Brand new journals (even renowned Scopus journals publication)
that are indexed from their first published issue will receive an impact
factor upon the conclusion of two years of indexing; in this case, the

4. citations for the year preceding volume 1 and the number of articles
published in the year preceding volume 1 are known null values.
● Journals that are indexed from a volume other than the first volume
will not have a published impact factor until three years of complete
data are known; directories and other irregular publications
sometimes will not publish any articles in a particular year, which will
affect the count.
● The impact factor is for a specific period of time; it is possible to
estimate the impact factor for any required period for which the
website offers instructions.
● Journal Citation Reports include a table of the relative ranking of
journals by impact factor in each specific scientific discipline, such as
organic chemistry or mechanical engineering.
● The calculation of the IF for the journal in which a person has
published articles is a controversial issue.
● Nevertheless, this has already been warned; abuse in the evaluation
of individuals because there is great variation from article to article in
a single journal, so, in an ideal world, reviewers would read each
article and make personal judgments, according to Eugene Garfield.
Research Authors Need To Beware, Impact Factors Aren’t Inffaliable &
Can Be Manipulated
● A journal can adopt editorial policies that improve its impact factor.
● These editorial policies cannot be limited to improving the quality of
published scientific work.
● Journals can sometimes publish a higher percentage of review
articles.
● While many research articles remain uncited after three years, almost
all review articles receive at least one citation within three years of
publication.
● Therefore, review articles can increase the impact factor of the
journal.
● The Thomson Scientific website provides instructions for removing
these journals from the calculation.
● For researchers or students with even a slight familiarity with the field,
journal reviews will be obvious.
● Journals can change the fraction of “citable items” to raw material in
the denominator of the IF equation.

5. ● The types of articles considered “citable” are largely a matter of
negotiation between journals and Thomson Scientific.
● As a result of these negotiations, variations in the impact factor of
more than 300% were observed.
● For instance, editorials in a journal don’t count as publications.
● Nevertheless, when they cite published articles, often articles from
the same journal, these citations increase the citation count of the
article.
● This effect is difficult to assess because the distinction between
editorial commentary and short original articles is not obvious.
● The “Letters to the editor” sections can belong to either of the
classes.
● Numerous methods, not necessarily with nefarious intent, exist for a
journal to cite articles in the same journal, which will increase the
impact factor of the journal.
● An editor of a journal might encourage authors to cite articles from
that journal in the articles they submit.
● The extent to which this practice affects the number of citations and
impact factor included in journal data cited by Journal Citation
Reports, therefore, needs to be considered.
● Most of these effects are discussed in detail on the site’s help pages,
along with ways to correct the numbers for these effects if desired.
● Nevertheless, it is almost universal for articles in a journal to cite
primarily its own articles, as they are those of equal merit in the same
specialist area.
● If this is done artificially, the effect will become particularly noticeable
when –
○ journals have low impact factors (in absolute terms) and
○ publish a few articles per year.
● Participate in an upcoming conference in 2022 to learn more about
all the reasons why a journal’s IF value isn’t necessarily a mark of its
quality.
How Not To Use The Impact Factor Value Of A Journal
● The impact factor is often misused in the prediction of the importance
of an individual post based on where it was posted.
● This does not work well because a small number of publications are
cited much more than the majority – for instance, around the

6. overwhelming majority of a highly reputable journal’s impact factor
could be based entirely on only a quarter of its publications, and
therefore the importance of any publication will be different and on
average lower than the total number.
● The impact factor, however, averages all articles and therefore
underestimates the citations of the top cited while overstating the
number of citations of the average publication.
● Academic reviewers involved in program evaluations, especially
those at doctoral awarding institutions, often look to ISI’s proprietary
IF list of the top most academic journals to determine scholarly
output.
● This creates a bias that automatically underestimates certain types of
research and distorts the total contribution of each faculty member.
● The absolute value of an impact factor has no meaning in itself.
● A journal with an IF of two would not be very impressive in a field
such as Particle Physics, whereas it would be in Biomedical
Engineering.
● However, such values ​
​
are sometimes announced by scientific
publishers.
● A comparison of impact factors between different domains is not
valid.

7. ● Yet these comparisons have been widely employed for the evaluation
not only of journals but also of scientists and academic departments.
● It’s not right to say, for instance, that a department whose
publications have an average IF of less than two is of a low level.
● This wouldn’t make sense for mechanical engineering, where only
two review journals achieve such value.
● Outside of science, impact factors are relevant for fields that have a
publication pattern similar to science (such as economics), where
research publications are almost always journal articles that cite other
journals’ research articles.
● They are irrelevant to literature, where the most important
publications are books citing other books.
● Therefore, Thomson Scientific does not publish JCRs for the
humanities.
● Even if applied in this way in practice, impact factors cannot be
properly considered by libraries in journal selection.
● The journal’s local usefulness is at least as important as is whether or
not a faculty member at an institution is the journal’s editor or
member of its editorial board.
● Although the impact factor was originally conceived as an objective
measure of a journal’s reputation (Garfield), it is now increasingly
applied to measure the productivity of scientists.
● It is usually used to analyze the impact factors of the journals in which
the researcher’s articles have been published.
● This has obvious allure for an academic administrator unfamiliar with
the subject or the journals.
● The absolute number of research scientists, the average number of
authors on each article, and the nature of the results in different fields
of research, as well as variations in citation habits between different
disciplines, in particular the number of citations in each article,
combine to impact factors between different groups of scientists
immeasurably.
● Generally, for instance, medical journals have higher impact factors
than mathematical journals and engineering journals.
● This limitation is accepted by the publishers; they were never claimed
to be useful across domains – such use is an indication of
misunderstanding.
● The HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) has
been urged by the UK Parliament’s Science and Technology
Committee to remind Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) panels

8. that they are required to evaluate the content quality of individual
articles, not the reputability of the journal in which they are published.
● The number of article citations in a particular journal doesn’t really
directly indicate the true quality of a scientific journal, much less the
scientific merit of the articles the journal contains.
● It is also a reflection, at least in part, of the intensity of publication or
citation in that field, the current popularity of that particular subject, as
well as the availability of particular journals.
● Low circulation journals, regardless of the scientific merit of their
content, will never achieve high impact factors in absolute terms, but
if all the journals on a specific topic are low circulation, as in some
fields of botany and zoology, the standing relationship is significant.
● Owing to the fact that defining the quality of an academic publication
is challenging, involving unquantifiable factors, such as the impact on
the next generation of researchers, assigning this value to a specific
numerical measure cannot tell the whole story.
● By simply counting the frequency of citations per article and ignoring
the prestige of the citing journals, the impact factor simply becomes a
measure of popularity, not prestige.
The Actual Significance Of The Impact Factor Value Of Journals
● It is important to remember that although impact factors tend to
correlate with the reliability or prestige of the journal, the metric is not
in itself an indicator of the quality of the journal.
● Thinking back to the calculation discussed earlier, the impact factor is
simply the ratio of citations to recent citable articles published.
● Many scholars and institutions erroneously refer to impact factors as
a measure of journal quality when it is instead a measure of impact
on the academic community of interest.
● In reality, the absolute value of the impact factor value of a journal
doesn’t mean much; these values ​
​
must be interpreted in the
appropriate context.
● Citation habits and frequency of publication vary considerably from
one field of research to another.
● Therefore, impact factors shouldn’t be made use of to compare
journals across disciplines.

9. ● For instance, the frequency of citations and publications is much
lower in mathematics and physics than in medicine, so medical
journals will generally have higher impact factors.
● Review articles, in particular, typically are read and cited more
frequently; therefore, journals that publish review articles may inflate
impact factor scores.
● Each year, publishers are under pressure to increase journal impact
factors. There have been instances of journal editors unethically
manipulating impact factors to improve ratings for secondary gain.
● Editors can achieve this by rejecting manuscripts if they are unlikely
to be highly cited, or even some have gone so far as to reject
heavy-handed manuscripts and authors in order to cite more
papers/articles from their journal exclusively in order to be accepted.
Narrow-focus journals that cater to a more niche community like
Astroparticle Physics will inevitably have a lower impact factor than
those that reach a broader reader base like the Journal of Astronomy.
● The types of articles and the size of the target audience for a journal
play an important role in the final value of the impact factor.
● Although journal impact factors can be a useful tool for evaluating
and comparing journals in a specific field, the decision to submit your
manuscript to a journal should not be based entirely on their impact
factor.

10. ● Know your target audience and do some research to decide correctly
which journal would be the best suited for your work to be published
in, and don’t get too distracted with where your publication will fall on
the “prestige” ranking.
● For most students and research professionals, the objective would be
to write a paper with a high impact factor.
● However, you usually have to walk before you run.
● Therefore, working with an assistant and publishing journal articles,
book chapters, and case reports is a great way to learn editing
basics.
● At this level, any posting looks impressive on your resume and gives
residency and fellowship program directors an appreciation of your
ability to write well and your work ethic.
● As your experience increases, moving on to research papers in
high-impact journals will be an easier “next step” if you have gained
experience.
Crucial Facts About The Impact Factor That All Research Authors
Should Be Aware Of
● It is crucial for market research for publishers and others.
● It is an important tool for librarians, researchers, and librarians.
● It is also a vital tool for the researcher to select a reputable journal
and publish it in old and reputable journals.
● The impact factor can be made use of to provide a rough
approximation of a journal’s prestige.
● It is also a tool for judicious use and careful citation of data in
journals.
● In general, authors should bear in mind that
● The impact factor can be calculated after completing the minimum
three years of publication.
● The log impact factor will only be a quotient factor and will not be a
quality factor.
● The impact factor of the journal will not be related to the quality of
content and the quality of peer review.
● Journals that publish more review articles will get the highest impact
factors.
● The impact factor strongly depends on the discipline.
● The impact factor couldn’t be reproduced in an independent audit.

11. ● The impact factor has to do with the average number of citations per
article.
● Citation counting can be independent of the actual “impact” of the
work among researchers and scientific communities.
● Self-citations and deliberate addition of the same journal article with
favorable editorial policies may journals or publishers not be taken
into account for the evaluation of the impact factor.
● The citation count may be applied incorrectly to rate the importance
of an individual post or to rate an individual researcher.
● A title change has an impact on the impact factor for two years after a
change has been made. Old and new titles typically aren’t unified
unless the titles are in the same place in alphabetical order