What is an acceptable journal impact factor?

In most fields, the impact factor of 10 or greater is considered an excellent score while 3 is flagged as good and the average score is less than 1. However, the impact factor is best read in terms of subject matter in the form of the 27 research disciplines identified in the JournalCitation Reports.

Why impact factor is not reliable?

The JIF can be manipulated. Editors can manipulate their journals’ impact factor in various ways. To increase their JIF, they may publish more review articles, which attract a large number of citations, and stop publishing case reports, which are infrequently cited.

What do you think about the use of impact factor of journals for evaluating research?

Impact factor is commonly used to evaluate the relative importance of a journal within its field and to measure the frequency with which the “average article” in a journal has been cited in a particular time period. Journals with higher IFs believed to be more important than those with lower ones.

Should I care about impact factor?

So my overall answer to the question of should you care about Journal Impact Factor is: yes, you should. You should take that as one of the factors that comes into you deciding on a target journal, and it should be a highly weighted factor.

What is an impact factor for journals Why is it important?

Impact Factors are used to measure the importance of a journal by calculating the number of times selected articles are cited within the last few years. The higher the impact factor, the more highly ranked the journal. It is one tool you can use to compare journals in a subject category.

What is a bad impact factor?

In most fields, the impact factor of 10 or greater is considered an excellent score while 3 is flagged as good and the average score is less than 1.

What does it mean if a journal does not have an impact factor?

A journal may be recently published and has not yet an impact factor, or it was just accepted in say the ISI database, etc.

Is journal impact factor important?

Conclusions. The impact factor is a useful tool for evaluation of journals, but it must be used very carefully. Considerations include the amount of review articles, letters or other types of material published in the journal, variations between disciplines, and item-by-item impact.

What is the difference between impact factor and CiteScore of a journal?

A primary difference between these two metrics is the period of time for the calculation; while the Journal Impact Factor calculates the metric using the two previous years as a basis for the citation count, CiteScore uses a three-year period.

What is an impact factor and why is it used by the scientific community?

The journal impact factor, JIF, is a way of ranking scientific journals on the basis of how often their articles are cited. …

What determines the impact factor of a journal article?

Publication Date: The impact factor is based on citation frequency of articles from a journal in their first few years of publication. This does not serve well the journals with articles that get cited over a longer period of time (let’s say, 10 years) rather than immediately.

What are impact factors (if)?

The underlying assumption behind Impact Factors (IF) is that journals with high IF publish articles that are cited more often than journals with lower IF. Impact factors may be used by: Authors to decide where to submit an article for publication. Libraries to make collection development decisions

How does citation affect impact factor?

As long as a paper in a journal has been cited, the citation contributes to the journal’s impact factor, regardless of whether the cited paper is being credited or criticized. 8,11 This means that papers being refuted or exemplified as weak studies can also augment a journal’s impact factor.

Why do some journals have higher IFs than others?

In other words, journals in rapidly expanding fields such as cell biology and computing tend to have much higher immediate citation rates leading to higher IFs than journals in fields like Education or Economics. Journal Impact Factor not Article Impact Factor: Citations to articles in a journal are not evenly distributed.