Impact Factor (IF) or Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is considered as one of the measures to judge the quality of a journal. As we know that IF value is based on Number of Citation ( https://clarivate.com/webofsciencegroup/essays/impact-factor/?elq=8002fcce746d49ef968516f29d825087 ). Commonly, the journal with a higher value of IF is considered to be of High-Quality Journal. However, it can easily be observed that most of the Review Journals have high-IF as compared to those who publish purely novel works. Additionally, there are some new journals which have started recently have very high-IF values. Normally, highly experienced researchers used to judge the quality of the journals properly (it is my observation).
New researchers are often getting mislead with the value of IFs while judging the quality of a journal (as I think). More confusion arises as there are several other agencies who give (acclaim) IFs values.
Sometimes, we just find the journal in the list of SCI/Scopus listed journals to judge the quality of the journal. Here, we also see that every year, SCI and Scopus update the list by adding/removing some journals. Here, it also cannot guarantee that the selected journal will remain in the list next year.
How should one judge the quality of a journal?
Hope that your quality inputs to this question will help new researchers.
Thanking you in advance for your input.
With regards
The impact factor (IF) is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. It is used to measure the importance or rank of a journal by calculating the times it's articles are cited.
The calculation is based on a two-year period and involves dividing the number of times articles were cited by the number of articles that are citable...
https://researchguides.uic.edu/if/impact
The impact factor (IF) is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. It is used to measure the importance or rank of a journal by calculating the times it's articles are cited.
The calculation is based on a two-year period and involves dividing the number of times articles were cited by the number of articles that are citable...
https://researchguides.uic.edu/if/impact
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
dear Mohammad
the journal impact factor shows how many researchers use findings of the journal in building the new research thus show how the findings of this journal effect on science.
by mentioning this, the journal with high IF has a great effect on the science stream.
IF is calculated for two year or 5 years, and when someone wants to evaluate the quality by IF it's better to use 5 years and is the 5 years IF is not accessible, use at least IFs of last 5 years.
another thing is that IF is provided by several agencies like ISI or Scopus. the IF of these agencies is based on articles that cite the journal and is indexed in that agency.
another way to evaluate the quality of journals is to use the Q, the journals of a field are divided to 4 Q and the Q1 journals are best and Q4 is least in quality in that field.
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