Journal Impact Factor
Journal Title: National Journal of Integrated Research in Medicine - Year 2010, Vol 1, Issue 1
Abstract
Like nuclear energy, the impact factor has become a mixed blessing. I expected that it would be used constructively while recognizing that in the wrong hands it might be abused. In the early 1960s Irving H. Sher and Eugene Garfield created the journal impact factor to help select journals for the Science Citation Index (SCI)1 The use of the term “impact factor” has gradually evolved, especially in Europe, to include both journal and author impact. This ambiguity often causes problems. It is one thing to use impact factors to compare journals and quite another to use them to compare authors. The impact factor of a journal reflects the frequency with which the journal's articles are cited in the scientific literature. It is derived by dividing the number of citations in year 3 to any items published in the journal in years 1 and 2 by the number of substantive articles published in that journal in years 1 and 22. For example, for 1997 impact factors the following formula was used: Impact Factor = citation of article published in 1995-96 article published in 1995-96 The impact factor will help you evaluate a journal’s relative importance, especially when you compare it to others in the same field. Journal Impact factors can be accessed and compared through the Journal Citation Reports database (JCR). The impact factor is useful in clarifying the significance of absolute (or total) citation frequencies. It eliminates some of the bias of such counts which favor large journals over small ones, or frequently issued journals over less frequently issued ones, and of older journals over newer ones. Particularly in the latter case such journals have a larger citable body of literature than smaller or younger journals. All things being equal, the larger the number of previously published articles, the more often a journal will be cited3, 4. The following points should be borne in mind when consulting impact factors5: Citation does not automatically imply that a work is of high quality: a work may be heavily cited because lots of other authors are refuting the research findings it contains. Beware of citation bias: people may cite their own work, or work from the journals in which they publish. An impact factor is a measure of average citation impact, not individual citation impact, so an impact factor cannot be used to measure the performance of an individual. Time needs to elapse before a meaningful citation analysis can be made, so new journals tend to fare badly. Not all research work is published and cited in the citation indices: conference proceedings, for example are often poorly covered. There is a bias in favour of English language material on citation indices.
Authors and Affiliations
Dr. Chinmay Shah
Keywords
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