I never heard about the Universal Impact factor before so I looked at the homepage:

1) I selected the list of indexed journals for 2012 and 2013 and in both cases I just got an error.

2) I tried to search for key journals in my field but the page isn't searchable by journal title, only using ISBN.

3) I found the ISBN for 3 key journals in my field which have reasonable good Thomson Reuters Impact factor: Chemosphere, Water Research and Journal of Hazardous Materials. Neither of them is registered so they don’t have an UIF.

4) I selected the homepages "About us" to see who designed this and guarantee the content. No person names, companies or institutions are mentioned. This reminds me of the predatory publishers that I am daily annoyed by emails from.

Therefore I think it is useless to compare UIF with the established impact factors and UIF is properly worthless as of now. It appears to be a service which is under development and I suspect it is connected to the predatory journals who cannot get registered with Thomson Reuters and Scopus.

I never heard about the Universal Impact factor before so I looked at the homepage:

1) I selected the list of indexed journals for 2012 and 2013 and in both cases I just got an error.

2) I tried to search for key journals in my field but the page isn't searchable by journal title, only using ISBN.

3) I found the ISBN for 3 key journals in my field which have reasonable good Thomson Reuters Impact factor: Chemosphere, Water Research and Journal of Hazardous Materials. Neither of them is registered so they don’t have an UIF.

4) I selected the homepages "About us" to see who designed this and guarantee the content. No person names, companies or institutions are mentioned. This reminds me of the predatory publishers that I am daily annoyed by emails from.

Therefore I think it is useless to compare UIF with the established impact factors and UIF is properly worthless as of now. It appears to be a service which is under development and I suspect it is connected to the predatory journals who cannot get registered with Thomson Reuters and Scopus.

Dear Henrik,

Thank you very much fro your answer.

with best regards

László

Dear Piotr

I do not know whether it is or not, but I know as editor of an open acess journal that we have been given this factor but we had no any contact with this UIF company. So we had no affect on the value at all. But I do not know absolutly what the value of this factor....?

From my standpoint, impact factors are extremely flawed measures and should not be given serious consideration. They are subject to manipulation and can vary extremely from year to year. You might want to consider this article which does a pretty good job of debunking them:

Gallivan, M. J. (2009). Unpacking the Journal "Impact Factor" and Its Effect on IS Research: Does it Do More Harm than Good?". Paper presented at the Proceedings of the America's Conference on Information Systems, San Francisco, CA.

Dear Michael,

You are absolutly right, but all journal are measured by impact factor - evenif that does not give a real picture.

Hi Lazlo, I would recommend reading this post [ http://scholarlyoa.com/2013/08/06/bogus-impact-factor-companies/ ]. The comments are also an informative/amusing read. BW Matt

Dear Matt,

Thank you, the url is very useful. At least I could find some information about predatory journals, because I have heard about them but I could know anything about the "criteria'.

Dear Mehrdad

Thank you for the papers and information !

László

Dear Mehrdad

Thank you very much for your kindly help. My journal was given two impact factors- one from UIF and other from RJIF withotu asking - but I had no any idea about these organizations, about reality of these factors, etc.

with best regards

László

Thank you !

Jalalian:

I well agree with your points. Many thanks for alerting your paper. In this context I have written a short piece in Current Science. http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/106/09/1173.pdf

Please see and send your comments.

I read the paper, and I have to agree with you that the editorial board members with real value and non valuble memberships, or IF given by one or other society are mixed.

Thomson Reuters Impact factor cannot be required in the first two years of a journal, but without IF who will publish in a new journal ? So it is not as easy to take different between a correct new open acces journal and a predatory journal, thus the list of predatory journals should be refreshed form month to month to inform the scientist not to send any paper to these. .

Yes. you are correct. It is very difficult to differentiate the genuine journal and predatory journal.

Predatory journals are rund by fraud people and company. They do not have proper address. Researchers should examine the publisher (Whether popular commercial firms or Scholarly societies) of the journal, the contact information (valid email id) and affiliation if any. See the editor (others) in the journal and his/her scientific background. Avoid journals that ask for APC, unless you know the quality of the publisher. As you said, the other way is that the list of such journals has to be updated periodically in a permanent portal.Thomson Retuers has their stringent policy or criteria for inclusion of any journal into their databases. They require monitoring of the performance of any journal for two years.

Thank you for your answer !

Jalalian:

I visited the journal's website http://wjst.wu.ac.th/index.php/wjst

and found that the journal has IF values as below:

2012 TCI Impact Factor: 0.108

3-Year TCI Impact Factor: 0.079

The IF is assigned from the Thailand Citation Index. If each country has its own citation index and IF values for their journals, then there is no need of Thomson Reuters' IF values. Thomson Reuters has its own stringent process/policy for inclusion of any journal into their databases. I do not konw, how these kind of country specific IF values are important to satisfy the global research community.

There isn't country specific impact factors. It's a fake.

The journal you mention has been Scopus indexed since 2012 and the total number of citations received by all the papers over more than 2 years is 6.

Dear Blake,

Thank you !

Blake. You can also provide ISSN of the journal. I just want to clarify that whether the JIF is based on JCR 2012 (Sci or Soc Sci edition)? The database needs subscription to access it.

Thanks.

Maybe also you can find SCIMago usefull.

Dear Dr. Kotai, 

The Thomson Reuter's impact factor is a complete quantitative, objective scientometric indicator related to scientific journals. The last indexing of IF

http://www.citefactor.org/journal-impact-factor-list-2014_J.html

There are included 9028 journals.  

According to the methodology for evaluating the Universal Impact factor is completely qualitative and subjective indicator. So, it is not correct to be compared. I will add that the location and publisher of Universal Impact factor are undisclosed. There are no asses to the journal master list in the site www.uifactor.org. So, there is no information about the number of journals evaluated. There is only a list of the last 7 evaluated journals - 4 from India and others from Nigeria, Iran and Tunisia. There facts are enough for me to judge that Universal Impact factor is untrustworthy  for me. 

According to my sporadic observation I have not able to find even any correlation between the quantitative indicators as TR's Impact factor, Elsevier's SJR index,Thomson-Reuters''s  Eigenfactor and H-Index. 

I wish to correct my previous post. I succeed to download the Journal master list for UIF. I found that 1105 journals were indexed for 2013. The UIF values vary from 0.01 to 6.5 as the average value is 0.9. However, the journal "American Journal of Materials Science and Engineering" with the highest value has not any TR's impact factor. 

I just trust IF of Thomson ISI....

What Dr Mehrdad Jalalian said is correct. It is fake and dubious journals. Thomson Reuters' impact factor for journals is reliable and authentic.

Okay, Thomson IF is trustworthy,  but there are journals which has no Thomson IF -although the journals are reviewed and worked correctly - but due to any other reason Thomson does not want to index them.  How we can measure the value of these journals comparing with ISI journals if UIF and similar impact factors are qualitative only? 

The so-called UIF is fake while the TR impact factor appears to more popular. Although this is a personal opinion, I suggest that scholars should focus on conducting quality research than focusing on impact factors.    

Thomson gives impact factor for the jounals indexed in Web of science database only.  For other journals it does not provide impact factors.  that does not mean that the other impact factors are fake.  There are also controversial discussions about the Impact factor.  Hence it is better concentrate on conducting quality research

UIF gives IF for primarily predatory journals. Do not accept UIF for journals. Only IF of journals given by Thomson Reuters is accepted by Universities.

UIF is not acceptable. Only IF is ok. Plz submit your works to journa;s with IF.

Other i not considerable. It is my suggestion.

My answer to you, translated from french:                                                

You are welcome. This article will be soon published in English.

My best regards and wishes,

Mirjana