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Impact Factors

• Journal Impact Factor
• Author Impact Factor
• Article Impact
• Document Your Research Impact

Other Perspectives on Impact Factors

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) recognizes that impact factors are sometimes misused.

It begins "There is a pressing need to improve the ways in which the output of scientific research is evaluated by funding agencies, academic institutions, and other parties."

An Impact Factor is a quantitative measure of the relative importance of a journal, individual article or scientist to science and social science literature and research.

Each index or database used to create an impact factor uses a different methodology and produces slightly different results.  This is why it is important to use several sources to gauge the true impact of a journal's or scientist’s work.

This guide includes information on Journal Impact Factor , Author Impact Factor , Article Impact Factor , and Documenting Your Research Impact .

Informed and careful use of these impact data is essential, and should be based on a thorough understanding of the methodology used to generate impact factors. There are controversial aspects of using impact factors:

• It is not clear whether the number of times a paper is cited measures its actual quality.
• Some databases that calculate impact factors fail to incorporate publications including textbooks, handbooks and reference books.
• Certain disciplines have low numbers of journals and usage. Therefore, one should only compare journals or researchers within the same discipline.
• Review articles normally are cited more often and therefore can skew results.
• Self-citing may also skew results.
• Some resources used to calculate impact factors have inadequate international coverage.
• Editorial policies can artificially inflate an impact factor.

Please contact  your library liaison , or submit your question using the HSL comment box .

• Next: Journal Impact Factor >>
• Last Updated: Feb 6, 2024 10:31 AM
• URL: https://guides.lib.uw.edu/hsl/impactfactors

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Journal Metrics

This page provides information on peer review performance and citation metrics for  Scientific Data . Our  quick reference guide to journal metrics  is also available for download.

2023 Peer Review Metrics

Submission to first editorial decision: the median time (in days) from when a submission is received to when a first editorial decision about whether the paper was sent out for formal review or not is sent to the authors.

Submission to Accept: the median time (in days) from the submission date to the final editorial acceptance date.

Submission to first editorial decision - 27

Submission to Accept - 159

2022 Journal Metrics

On this page you will find a suite of citation-based metrics for  Scientific Data . Brief definitions for each of the metrics used to measure the influence of our journals are included below the journal metrics. Data has been produced by Clarivate Analytics.

For recently launched journals, metrics are calculated from available citation data. If a metric uses multiple years of data, new journals may have partial metrics.

While the metrics presented here are not intended to be a definitive list, we hope that they will prove to be informative. The page is updated on an annual basis.

2-year Impact Factor - 9.8

5-year Impact Factor - 10.8

Immediacy index - 0.9

Eigenfactor® score - 0.04464

Article Influence Score - 33

2023 Usage Metrics

Article-level metrics are also available on each article page, allowing readers to track the reach of individual papers.

6,408,593 Downloads 

14,885 Altmetric mentions

Definitions

2-year impact factor.

The Journal Impact Factor is defined as all citations to the journal in the current JCR year to items published in the previous two years, divided by the total number of scholarly items (these comprise articles, reviews, and proceedings papers) published in the journal in the previous two years. (Courtesy of  Clarivate Analytics )

5-year Impact Factor

The 5-year journal Impact Factor, available from 2007 onward, is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR year. It is calculated by dividing the number of citations in the JCR year by the total number of articles published in the five previous years. (Courtesy of  Clarivate Analytics )

Immediacy index

The Immediacy Index is the average number of times an article is cited in the year it is published. The journal Immediacy Index indicates how quickly articles in a journal are cited. (Courtesy of  Clarivate Analytics )

Eigenfactor® Score

The  Eigenfactor Score  calculation is based on the number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR year, but it also considers which journals have contributed these citations so that highly cited journals will influence the network more than lesser cited journals. References from one article in a journal to another article from the same journal are removed, so that  Eigenfactor Scores  are not influenced by journal self-citation. (Courtesy of  Clarivate Analytics )

Article Influence Score

The  Article Influence Score  determines the average influence of a journal's articles over the first five years after publication. It is calculated by multiplying the  Eigenfactor Score  by 0.01 and dividing by the number of articles in the journal, normalized as a fraction of all articles in all publications. This measure is roughly analogous to the  5-Year Journal Impact Factor  in that it is a ratio of a journal's citation influence to the size of the journal's article contribution over a period of five years. (Courtesy of  Clarivate Analytics )

Downloads reflect the number of times full text or PDF versions of articles are accessed directly from the journal website. Downloads are defined as HTML, LookInside, PDF and Epub clicks. Please note that this does not include article downloads from mirror databases such as PubMed Central.

Altmetric mentions

Total number of mentions (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Blogs, News articles, Policy documents and Faculty of 1000 reviews) for articles published in the specified timeframe, as provided by  Altmetric .

Quick links

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• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

• Research Process

What is Journal Impact Factor?

• 3 minute read
• 236.4K views

Table of Contents

Daunted by the idea of choosing the right journal for your paper? Don’t be. Metrics have become an everyday word in scholarship, in general. Within its many fields of research – if not all of them – they provide important data about a journal’s impact and relevance among its readers. In an era of information proliferation, it has become increasingly important to know where to capture the most attention and interest of your target audience.

So, whenever you are in doubt about which journal suits you better, don’t forget to browse its metrics; they will certainly help you with the decision-making process. Start, for example, with the Journal Impact Factor.

Impact factor (IF) is a measure of the number of times an average paper in a journal is cited, during a year. Clarivate Analytics releases the Journal Impact Factors annually as part of the Web of Science Journal Citation Reports®. Only journals listed in the Science Citation Index Expanded® (SCIE) and Social Sciences Citation Index® (SSCI) receive an Impact Factor.

What is a good impact factor for a scientific journal?

Impact Factors are used to measure the importance of a journal by calculating the number of times selected articles are cited within a particular year. Hence, the higher the number of citations or articles coming from a particular journal, or impact factor, the higher it is ranked. IF is also a powerful tool if you want to compare journals in the subject category.

Measuring a Journal Impact Factor:

• CiteScore metrics – helps to measure journal citation impact. Free, comprehensive, transparent and current metrics calculated using data from Scopus®, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature.
• SJR – or SCImago Journal Rank, is based on the concept of a transfer of prestige between journals via their citation links.
• SNIP – or Source Normalized Impact per Paper, is a sophisticated metric that accounts for field-specific differences in citation practices.
• JIF – or Journal Impact Factor is calculated by Clarivate Analytics as the average of the sum of the citations received in a given year to a journal’s previous two years of publications, divided by the sum of “citable” publications in the previous two years.
• H-index – Although originally conceived as an author-level metric, the H -index has been being applied to higher-order aggregations of research publications, including journals.

Deciding the perfect journal for your paper is an important step. Metrics are excellent tools to guide you through the process. However, we also recommend you not neglect a perfectly written text, not only scientific and grammatically but also fitting the chosen journal’s requirements and scope. At Elsevier, we provide text-editing services that aim to amend and adjust your manuscript, to increase its chances of a successful acceptance by your target journal. Although each journal has its own editorial team, the overall quality, language and whether the article is innovative may also play a role.

Language Editing Services by Elsevier Author Services:

We know that, as an academic researcher, you have many things to do to stay relevant.

Writing relevant manuscripts is a crucial part of your endeavors.

That’s why we, at Elsevier Author Service s, support you throughout your publication journey with a suite of products and services to help improve your manuscript before submission.

Check our video Reach the highest standard with Elsevier Author Services to learn more about Author Services.

Find more about What is Journal Impact Factor? on Pinterest:

• Manuscript Preparation

How to Choose Keywords for a Manuscript?

• Publication Recognition

What is a Corresponding Author?

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Open Access

The Impact Factor Game

• The PLoS Medicine Editors

Published: June 6, 2006

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030291
• Reader Comments

It is time to find a better way to assess the scientific literature

Citation: The PLoS Medicine Editors (2006) The Impact Factor Game. PLoS Med 3(6): e291. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030291

Copyright: © 2006 The PLoS Medicine Editors. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. .

We would be lying if we said that our journal's impending first impact factor is not of interest to us. What PLoS Medicine' s impact factor might be is certainly one of the questions that crops up most regularly in discussions with authors, and because our authors' opinions matter to us, we are obliged to take it seriously. However, for a number that is so widely used and abused, it is surprising how few people understand how a journal's impact factor is calculated, and, more importantly, just how limited it is a means of assessing the true impact of an individual publication in that journal.

• Journal X's 2005 impact factor =
• Citations in 2005 (in journals indexed by Thomson Scientific [formerly known as Thomson ISI]) to all articles published by Journal X in 2003–2004
• Number of articles deemed to be “citable” by Thomson Scientific that were published in Journal X in 2003–2004

What is obvious from this equation is that the impact factor depends crucially on which article types Thomson Scientific deems as “citable”—the fewer, the better (i.e., the lower the denominator, the higher the impact factor).

Because a journal's impact factor is derived from citations to all articles in a journal, this number cannot tell us anything about the quality of any specific research article in that journal, nor of the quality of the work of any specific author. These points become particularly evident by understanding that a journal's impact factor can be substantially affected by the publication of review articles (which usually acquire more citations than research articles) or the publication of just a few very highly cited research papers.

Moreover, a journal's impact factor says nothing at all about how well read and discussed the journal is outside the core scientific community or whether it influences health policy. For a journal such as PLoS Medicine , which strives to make our open-access content reach the widest possible audience—such as patients, health policy makers, non-governmental organizations, and school teachers—impact factor is a poor measure of overall impact.

Despite these evident limitations, the impact factors of journals that authors publish in are very influential. Although even Thomson Scientific acknowledges that the impact factor has grown beyond its control and is being used in many inappropriate ways, the impact factors of journals have been used to decide whether or not authors get promoted, are given tenure or are offered a position in a department, or are awarded a grant. In some countries, government funding of entire institutions is dependent on the number of publications in journals with high impact factors.

Small wonder, then, that authors care so much about journals' impact factors and take them into consideration when submitting papers. Should we, as the editors of PLoS Medicine , also care about our impact factor and do all we can to increase it? This is not a theoretical question; it is well known that editors at many journals plan and implement strategies to massage their impact factors. Such strategies include attempting to increase the numerator in the above equation by encouraging authors to cite articles published in the journal or by publishing reviews that will garner large numbers of citations. Alternatively, editors may decrease the denominator by attempting to have whole article types removed from it (by making such articles superficially less substantial, such as by forcing authors to cut down on the number of references or removing abstracts) or by decreasing the number of research articles published. These are just a few of the many ways of “playing the impact factor game.”

One problem with this game, leaving aside the ethics of it, is that the rules are unclear—editors can, for example, try to persuade Thomson Scientific to reduce the denominator, but the company refuses to make public its process for choosing “citable” article types. Thomson Scientific, the sole arbiter of the impact factor game, is part of The Thomson Corporation, a for-profit organization that is responsible primarily to its shareholders. It has no obligation to be accountable to any of the stakeholders who care most about the impact factor—the authors and readers of scientific research. Although we have not attempted to play this game, we did, because of the value that authors place on it, attempt to understand the rules. During discussions with Thomson Scientific over which article types in PLoS Medicine the company deems as “citable,” it became clear that the process of determining a journal's impact factor is unscientific and arbitrary. After one in-person meeting, a telephone conversation, and a flurry of e-mail exchanges, we came to realize that Thomson Scientific has no explicit process for deciding which articles other than original research articles it deems as citable. We conclude that science is currently rated by a process that is itself unscientific, subjective, and secretive.

During the course of our discussions with Thompson Scientific, PLoS Medicine' s potential impact factor— based on the same articles published in the same year —seesawed between as much as 11 (when only research articles are entered into the denominator) to less than 3 (when almost all article types in the magazine section are included, as Thomson Scientific had initially done—wrongly, we argued, when comparing such article types with comparable ones published by other medical journals). At the time of writing this editorial, we do not know exactly where our 2005 impact factor has settled. But whatever it turns out to be, as you might guess from this editorial, we feel the time has come for the process of “deciding” a journal's impact factor to be debated openly. Something that affects so many people's careers and the future of departments and institutions cannot be kept a secret any longer.

Even more importantly, it is time to reconsider the whole process of accurately assessing an individual paper's worth not only to scientists, but also to the wider community of readers. First, although any measure of impact will remain flawed in some way, when assessing the impact of individual articles or of the papers of individuals or groups of scientists, it surely makes more sense to measure the citations specifically to those individual articles (or to papers by individuals or groups of scientists) rather than using a journal's impact factor as a proxy measure. However, it is not clear whether Thomson Scientific could measure such individual article citations accurately. Second, we urge the company to take its responsibility seriously and increase transparency and accountability. Third, we suggest that the company's staff engage in the ongoing debate among other shareholders of scientific publishing and recognize that, there are—finally—other ways of measuring impact and visibility of scholarly articles. Thomson Scientific now faces competition from organizations that have developed online tools for citation counting, such as Google Scholar and CrossRef, and this competition may help to bring about overdue change. Other measures of scientific impact may also become widely adopted, such as the usage factor, which is being promoted by the United Kingdom Serials Group ( http://www.uksg.org/rfp.pdf ), or the Y factor, a combination of both the impact factor and the weighted page rank, developed by Google ( http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~okram/papers/journal-status.pdf ).

These new measures may go some way to helping assess and perhaps quantify the many roles that medical journals have, in a way that measuring citations only to research articles cannot. Magazine sections, such as those that we and other medical journals publish, not only “add value” to the research articles by interpreting them for a wider audience but have other vital roles: they may help to set agendas—by publishing policy papers or highlighting neglected health issues; give underrepresented groups, such as medical students or patient groups, a voice; or provide educational materials to physicians. Such articles will rarely be cited in indexed journals, but may be influential, for example, in changing health policy, or may be of educational value. For such articles, more relevant measures of impact may be the number of times they are downloaded, or covered in news articles, or referenced in policy documents.

Perhaps even measures such as these will become outmoded as the Internet allows for users to interact more directly with published articles. Journals have taken a step toward such a future with the publication of e-letters, and the physics preprint server arXiv.org has been promoting such interaction for many years. As more and more articles are available in full electronically and as search engines get more sophisticated at mining the Web and assessing usage, such interaction with the literature will become easier and readers will be able to judge papers for themselves rather than relying on outmoded surrogates for quality such as the impact factor. If authors are going to quote the impact factor of a journal, they should understand what it can and cannot measure. The opening up of the literature means that better ways of assessing papers and journals are coming—and we should embrace them.

Evaluating Research Impact: A Comprehensive Overview of Metrics and Online Databases

• Conference paper
• First Online: 20 December 2023
• Cite this conference paper

• Seema Ukidve 16 ,
• Ramsagar Yadav 17 ,
• Mukhdeep Singh Manshahia 17 &
• Jasleen Randhawa 18  

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems ((LNNS,volume 855))

Included in the following conference series:

• International Conference on Intelligent Computing & Optimization

99 Accesses

The purpose of this research paper is to analyze and compare the various research metrics and online databases used to evaluate the impact and quality of scientific publications. The study focuses on the most widely used research metrics, such as the h-index, the Impact Factor (IF), and the number of citations. Additionally, the paper explores various online databases, such as Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar, that are utilized to access and analyze research metrics. The study found that the h-index and IF are the most commonly used metrics for evaluating the impact of a publication. However, it was also found that these metrics have limitations and cannot be used as the sole criteria for evaluating the quality of research. The study also highlights the need for a comprehensive and holistic approach to research evaluation that takes into account multiple factors such as collaboration, interdisciplinary work, and societal impact. The analysis of online databases showed that while Web of Science and Scopus are considered to be the most reliable sources of research metrics, they may not cover all relevant publications, particularly those in less well-established or interdisciplinary fields. Google Scholar, on the other hand, is more inclusive but may not have the same level of accuracy and reliability as the other databases.

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Acknowledgements

Authors are grateful to Punjabi University, Patiala for providing adequate library and internet facility.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Mathematics, L. S. Raheja College of Arts and Commerce, Santacruz(W), Maharashtra, India

Seema Ukidve

Department of Mathematics, Punjabi University Patiala, Patiala, Punjab, India

Ramsagar Yadav & Mukhdeep Singh Manshahia

Panjab University Chandigarh, Chandigarh, India

Jasleen Randhawa

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Correspondence to Ramsagar Yadav .

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Faculty of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Ton Duc Thang University, Modeling Evolutionary Algorithms Simulation and Artificial Intelligence, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Pandian Vasant

Department of Computer Science, Chittagong University of Engineering & Technology, Chittagong, Bangladesh

Mohammad Shamsul Arefin

Federal Scientific Agroengineering Center VIM, Laboratory of Non-traditional Energy Systems, Russian University of Transport, Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, 127994 Moscow, Russia;, Moscow, Russia

Vladimir Panchenko

Department of Computer Science, UOW Malaysia KDU Penang University Colleage, George Town, Malaysia

J. Joshua Thomas

Northwest University, Mmabatho, South Africa

Elias Munapo

Faculty of Engineering Management, Poznań University of Technology, Poznan, Poland

Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber

Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, Universidad Panamericana, Mexico City, Mexico

Roman Rodriguez-Aguilar

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Ukidve, S., Yadav, R., Manshahia, M.S., Randhawa, J. (2023). Evaluating Research Impact: A Comprehensive Overview of Metrics and Online Databases. In: Vasant, P., et al. Intelligent Computing and Optimization. ICO 2023. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 855. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50158-6_24

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Published : 20 December 2023

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