So many metrics are currently in-use by various journals to show the quality of their journals. Again, the seemingly most mentioned metric s, Impact Factor (IF) is largely criticized as biased and can be artificially boosted. Also, many are used by mushroom journals while others such as Eigenfactor not often used even though said to be good. Some say Hirsch Index (popularly known as H-index) is the best. Which one is the best and should be conventionally adopted?
Hi,
The impact factor is a general measure of journal's citations versus publications during two or five years. There are other measures, such as articles influence score, and authors H-index that can help in evaluating a journal. There are non-measure ways to evaluate a journal, such as observing what type of papers are accepted for publication, who are the editors, what is the composition of the editorial board, etc.
As you say, there are many indexes available. Which one you use depends a lot on what you want to measure. ISI’s journal impact factor and similar indexes such as the eigenfactor article influence index are designed to rate journals. On the other hand, the h-index, h-b-index, g-index; m-quotient, l-index, and similar statistics are designed to determine the impact of scholars and/or articles.
If you are looking at journals, Khaled is correct in that specialty journals may have low impact factors simply because their scope is narrow. If there are fewer scholars working in that specialty field of study, then there will be fewer citations of the works in that specialty journal. Additionally, the journal impact factor creates a bias in favor of review journals and research has found inaccuracies in impact factors published in the ISI’s Journal Citation Reports.
Impact factor, IF is a common term and not peculiar to a particular database or publisher.
I find the following website instructive on this topic:
https://www.scimagojr.com/
You can get a journal's IF (based on a number of different yearly counts) and h-index, both over time. The nice thing about this website is that it puts journals into quartiles (again over time) so it avoids the obsession over specific rankings...
Martin A Andresen Ellen G. Cohn Khaled Shaaban Khaled Shaaban Avishag Gordon R.T Kamorudeen thank you for those useful comments.
I would say "Yes" if the impact factor measuring body is authentic and reliable. There are many fake of them therefore results from Scopus or JCR (Web of Science) are the best one and reliable to understand the quality of the journal.
Presentation "CiteScore vs Impact Factor", narrated by: Asst. Prof. Dr. E...
Hi
Here is the most encompassing critical analysis of h-index I could find.
Article The emperor’s new clothes: the h-index as a guide to resourc...
The impact factor is a measure of the frequency of citations per publication in a specific journal. Guillaume Fontaine , Kamoru A. Adedokun and Emad Kamil Hussein thank u for help.
Many researchers make the mistake of looking at journal citations rather than the quality of the researcher's research. Good publications can be found in all scientific journals.
As far as I know, Comparing IF with H- index is not true. Because they are not the same. But the IF can be compared with the SJR index.
Impact factor has some drawbacks. For example it is not free and it is not reasonable to compare journals in different domains.
Due to the problems mentioned for Impact Factor, SCImago's rating system, in an effort to overcome the above issues, has defined a new index and named it SJR (SCImago Journal Rank).
IF uses the Thomson Reuters database while the SJR uses the Scopus database.
The SJR gives weight to the citations. This weight is determined by the credibility of the journal. This means that the credibility of the journal is considered in the scoring. But not in IF
In SJR, the intervals are 3 years, while in IF these intervals are 2 years.
In the SJR the self-citation counts with a multiplier of 33% while in the IF with a multiplier of 100%.
So the SJR score is always lower than the IF and looks more accurate.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Journal Impact Factor