Kheng - I'm not sure tht there is a universal definition. However, there are general principles. A 'high impact' journal is one where its articles are regulalrly cited across the academic spectrum - and especially if they are cited in other high impact journals.

Citation indexes were first developed in the 1950s as a means to measure 'Impact Factor' of journals. Thomson Reuters Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Knowledge, via annual Journal Citation Reports (JCR), is the oldest. JCR is now linked to a newer form called The Clarivate Analytics Impact Factor (https://clarivate.com/essays/impact-factor/). Since the last edition of this book, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) Indicator (a sub-division of Scopus - https://www.scimagojr.com) has become equally, if not more popular. Their functions and format are relatively similar. The JCR (Clarivate Analytics) has both ‘science’ and ‘social science’ editions, which provide discipline-specific lists of journals, detailing the IF and other information, such as an ‘immediacy index’ (how quickly an average article in a journal is cited), and ‘cited half-life’ (the rate of continuing citations to a journal's articles).

Probably you want to know an amount (lower bound) for IF, above which we can say that some journal having high IF, right?

Kheng - I'm not sure tht there is a universal definition. However, there are general principles. A 'high impact' journal is one where its articles are regulalrly cited across the academic spectrum - and especially if they are cited in other high impact journals.

Citation indexes were first developed in the 1950s as a means to measure 'Impact Factor' of journals. Thomson Reuters Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Knowledge, via annual Journal Citation Reports (JCR), is the oldest. JCR is now linked to a newer form called The Clarivate Analytics Impact Factor (https://clarivate.com/essays/impact-factor/). Since the last edition of this book, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) Indicator (a sub-division of Scopus - https://www.scimagojr.com) has become equally, if not more popular. Their functions and format are relatively similar. The JCR (Clarivate Analytics) has both ‘science’ and ‘social science’ editions, which provide discipline-specific lists of journals, detailing the IF and other information, such as an ‘immediacy index’ (how quickly an average article in a journal is cited), and ‘cited half-life’ (the rate of continuing citations to a journal's articles).

In plain words impact of a journal is a scale of measure of standard with respect to its appreciation by citation and manuscripts submission etc.,

Impact Factors are used to measure the importance of a journal by calculating the number of times selected articles are cited within the last few years. The higher the impact factor, the more highly ranked the journal. It is one tool you can use to compare journals in a subject category.

"High-impact journals" - those considered to be highly influential in their fields. A journal's impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which an average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year.

In a nutshell High Impact means, it is widely circulated, articles are accepted as quality article and considered as top quality journal in that area.

I received the following reply from the Journal Editor. Agree?

I do think that a researcher know what is high (IF >5)

What is low (IF< 1)

Medium IF (1.5-4.0)

My posting is not to offend anyone. Just for scientific discussion.

The term 'high impact' has already been described by others those who have contributed. Citation patterns usually depend on subject domains. Even this could vary among the sub-disciplines of a major subject domain. Therefore, defining similar Impact Factor (your editor has defined a journal's 'impact' based on this numerical measure - Impact Factor) levels as 'High' and/or 'Low' is not valid for distinct subject domains. However, the numbers given by the editor could be the accepted IF numbers for levels namely High, Medium, and Low for your/journal's subject domain.

Kheng Soo Tay - Thank you for your question. The high impact factor journals are journals listed in the Journal Citation Reports issued by the Clarivate Analytics, used to be known as Thomson Reuters Institute of Scientific Information. These journals, based on their field, have the highest impact factor. However, there is no specific cut-point that differentiate between journals with high or low journal impact numbers. This is because the highest score varies according to the field of the journal. For example, in medicine, the journal "Cancer Journal For Clinicians" has the highest JIF of 187.040. At the same time, in medical education, "Academic Medicine" is on the top of this field with a JIF of 5.080 only. So we cannot have a cut point to differentiate, and the interpretation of JIF should be based on the field/discipline of the journal.

Kheng Soo Tay - I also recommend reading our paper on the JIF and indices used in promotion.

Great

The first indexing of citation for scientific journals appeared in the 1960's by the Eugene Garfield Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). At the beginning of the eighties, the Institute of Scientific Information began using quotation indexing to determine the impact factor of the scientific journal (IF) and this criterion was used as a basis for the arrangement of scientific journals, and the attention of researchers was directed to publishing in these vessels taking into account the impact factor of these vessels at the level of specialization.

The impact factor (IF) was invented by Eugene Garfield, and the impact factor for refereed scientific journals is a measure of the importance of refereed scientific journals within its field of research, and the impact factor reflects the extent of new research reference to research previously published in that journal. Citing it, and thus the magazine that has a high impact coefficient is an important journal because it is reliable and its published research is cited and cited more than it has a low impact coefficient.

In the early nineties, the Institute for Scientific Information was purchased by Thomson Scientific and adopted the name of the Web of Science for the electronic version of the index to include more than 10,000 scientific journals, including a number of open or free journals. The Ambassador Foundation in 2004 did a Scopus index, which includes more than 15,000 magazines, and Google also indexed through its Google Scholar website to provide indexing of all information available online for each publication, and a number of other related databases appeared after that Indexing

One major issue with the Impact Factor is that, as an average quantity, it contains no information about the distribution of citations. Universally across journals, this distribution is heavily skewed, with most of the citations contributing to the Impact Factor of any journal coming from a small set of comparatively highly cited papers, and the rest describing a long tail of research cited less frequently and sometimes not at all inside the two-year window. It has been suggested to make public the citation distributions of journals in order to address this issue, but it is not clear that such an approach will solve the problems of the misuse of the impact factor... (PDF) Peer Review: Objectivity, Anonymity, Trust. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341311165_Peer_Review_Objectivity_Anonymity_Trust [accessed Jun 16 2020].

Hi Kheng, I may be a little late, but thought I'd share my perspectives. Yes, generally a "high impact journal" is one where its widely circulated and read/cited by the scientific community (especially relevant to the journals' topic of interest). However, I prefer to refer to the tier (Q1? Q2...Q4?) for its ranking rather than the impact factor (IF). Reasoning is: IF are very subject dependent and thus to say an IF of 2 can mean very different things for two different disciplines. The tiers, would clearly be mentioned in terms of its discipline of interest. A journal which is Q1 in one field may be Q3 in another. So, if I am asked high impact? I'd say if its Q1 (in that field), yup...high impact. Q2, yeah I guess. Q3? probably medium at best. Q4? Low...but still tiered. Anything not tiered...well, I prefer not to comment and be (further) judgemental.

That’s a thought-provoking question. IF/JIF conventionally reflects the yearly average of citations of journal-published articles in a past two-year period. Such a calculation opens the door for open-access journals to chip in and have good standing. In short, despite being discredited nowadays, it is a blessing in disguise for publishers and scholars who foster open access.

Cheers,

It is rather better to know the rules for acceptance of paper set by' high impact' journals rather than knowing the defination.Generally impact factor of more than 10 are considerrd to be high impact journal but impactfactor of more than 5 should be sufficient to call a journal high impact journal.Thesr numbers are arbitrary but at atimes we look at number.