In a recent essay, Clarivate Analytics declared the "reasons for not calculating Impact Factors for journals covered in Arts & Humanities Citation Index":
"Journals unique to the Arts & Humanities Citation Index will not appear in Journal Citation Reports as this is an area where a large amount of work is done in books rather than in journals. Journals in Arts & Humanities Citation Index with overlap into Science Citation Index Expanded and/or Social Sciences Citation Index will be in Journal Citation Reports.
The primary reason that there is no Journal Citation Reports edition for Arts & Humanities is because the key metric used in Journal Citation Reports, the Journal Impact Factor, is not an appropriate measure for Arts & Humanities publications.
Journal Citation Reports is a report of journal-to-journal citation metrics based on a single citing year of data and incorporating two or five years of prior years' data into a set of performance metrics. In the Arts & Humanities, the whole profile of literature use is different - both in type and in time.
Type: Arts & Humanities depends less exclusively on journal communications than Social Sciences. Social Sciences, in turn, depend less heavily on journal literature than Science. The publication of books and the citations in and to these books are a critical part of how scholarly communication takes place in Arts & Humanities. To exclude books, citations in books, and citations to books from a performance metric in Arts & Humanities would under-represent the network of scholarly communications in these fields.
Time: Arts & Humanities citations span far more than two or five years - the two time frames used in Journal Impact Factor calculation. Scholarship on a subject can go through long phases of non-recognition - until some new scholar picks up a subject and re-invigorates it.
The net result is that Arts & Humanities journals will have, on the whole, very low Journal Impact Factors – and very low 5-Year Journal Impact Factors. Even a 10-year Journal Impact Factor will be very low for these materials. A Journal Impact Factor, by all its current definitions, is not the proper way to assess Arts & Humanities publishing. As the metrics offerings and Clarivate Analytics expand, we'll have more data and analyses to bring to bear on the question of performance assessment in Arts & Humanities."
https://support.clarivate.com/WebOfScience/s/article/ka1390000004bzSAAQ/Journal-Citation-Reports-Reasons-for-not-calculating-Impact-Factors-for-journals-covered-in-Arts-Humanities-Citation-Index?language=en_US
According to the new changes in JCR regarding Arts & Humanities Citation Index, how we can evaluate the research conducted in these categories?
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