Answered By: AFBI Library
Last Updated: Sep 27, 2022     Views: 14

Measuring the impact of a journal may help authors identify where to publish as well as how much visibility their research may expect in return.

Some journals are read and cited more than others. Journal impact measurements reflect the apparent prestige of a particular journal in a field and take into account the number of articles published per year and the number of citations to articles published in that journal.

Journal Impact Factors : 3 point survival plan

The Impact Factor of a journal only considers a brief period and can change from year to year. It is  only one metric and are therefore not perfect. When deciding where to publish keep the following points in mind:

  1. Compare the impact of your journal with other titles in the same subject area: be careful to only compare ‘like with like’ as differences in citation patterns can make any other comparison meaningless (eg. average journal impact factor for medicine is 3.17, average for maths is 0.71).

  2. The type of journals you are looking at: large journals tend to have higher Impact Factors, this does not mean they are of higher quality than smaller journals. Also, journals that publish more review articles are likely to get a higher number of cites than those which publish more research reports.

  3. The changing research landscape: Impact Factors are based solely on citation data and only consider recent frequency of citations – so immediacy matters. Rapidly growing fields (such as biochemistry) have higher immediacy rates and these journals may have higher Impact Factors, whereas journals that are cited steadily over a long period (say 10 years) may rate lower but may be of high quality.

For more information see:  How can I check the impact of a particular journal?

 

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