So, with this, does that mean that journals' IF went up with COVID articles and down again now? Will journals emphasise their "5-year average IF" because it makes their statistics look better?
I assume that in the Corona period 2019-2021, people utilize time in writing and published their most data due to no research activities. That leads to an immense increase in citations for years 2021 and 2022, but it seems that this effect is vanishing now, and the IF saturation levels for most journals reached already.