Journal impact factors and the influence of age and number of citations
Open accessAbstract
The impact factor (IF) of a scientific journal reflects the average number of citations of its recent articles, and is considered as a measure or ranking of a journal's importance within its discipline. The calculation of IF is based on a simple relationship between how many times journal articles are cited and how many articles are published. The most frequently used IF is based on the number of citations of publications from within the last 2 years. Thus, if a journal has an IF of 5 in 2013, the papers published in 2011 and 2012 were, on average, cited five times in 2013. Links between the success of individual researchers and the IF of the scientific journals chosen as publication outlets are quite direct and significant: (i) many universities have monetary incentives for researchers to publish in scientific journals with high IF; (ii) the IF of published articles plays a major role in the evaluation process for job applications and promotion evaluations for academic research positions; (iii) publishing in scientific journals with high IF may lead to invitations to join, for example, an important research committee or to become a journal editor; and (iv) graduate students may choose supervisors based on their publication record, including data on IF. The importance of IF in the evaluation of academic performance is underscored by the following quote from the Web of Knowledge website (http://wokinfo.com/essays/impact-factor/): ‘Perhaps the most important and recent use of i…
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Cites
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Flagged first, then by citations
3 of the 12 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
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“After all, citation indices rely on the foregoing two or five years for their evaluation of journals as well as authors (Griffith et al., 1979; Masic, 2024; Nansen & Meikle, 2014).”
- Authors
- Nansen, C., & Meikle, W. G.
- Affiliations
- The University of Western Australia (AU)
- Agricultural Research Service (US)
- Corresponding author
- Nansen, Christian
- Venue
- Molecular Plant Pathology
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2014-03-05
- Volume
- 15
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 223-225
- ISSN
- 1364-3703 (ISSN-L)
- 1464-6722
- PMC
- PMC6638655
- OpenAlex
- W1550301287
- Cited by
- 6
- References
- 12
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 1 · 2019: 2 · 2016: 1 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 0.65
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Molecular Plant Pathology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- UWA Profiles and Research Repository (UWA) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Psychology Research and Bibliometrics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Web visibility and informetrics
- Keywords
- journal impact factor, citation analysis, academic assessment, research agenda setting, publication incentives, journal prestige, bibliometric analysis
- MeSH terms
- Periodicals as Topic, Research, Time Factors, Journal Impact Factor
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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