A journal may lose its impact factor if it encourages self-citation (e.g. if authors are strongly suggested to cite 5 articles recently published in this journal or if such a suggestion is made to increase the impact factor of other journals belonging to the same publisher), if its quality goes down (e.g. if its behavior will start resembling 'pay and we'll publish whatever stuff you'll send us' journals) or if it does not manage to publish new volumes regularly.

It seems it is not a problem! Do not mentioned have journal if or not. You can publish Your results in e-archive for example, and take many citation. And another point we all well know the high quality journal and many outstanding journal have not so big if.

Actually, the IF of a journal depends on its readability. Certain high class journals of Mathematics are unreadable, because they are too tough, to most of the mathematics fraternity. Accordingly, IFs of such journals are low. But that hardly means that such journals are bad ones. Personally, I do not like the very concept of calculating IF.

Dear Koshel and Baruah, I totally agree with you that the IF value is not so important in science, but it is very important in our career degrees (to apply for associate or full professor for example). We publish to let the others know our results, and also to apply for higher degrees. In many university, they almost consider the SCI journals only, so if someone publishes in an indexed journal then it is out of index, this wastes their efforts a lot.

Yes, Elnesr, it is a compulsion in a way. Nothing can be done about that. However, if an article is published in a journal with high IF, this does not actually mean that the article is automatically of high standard. Standard of an article should be judged based on citations. So a high citation index of an article is more important than a high impact factor of the journal concerned. At least that is what I feel. I may be wrong of course!

Http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/09/how-journals-nature-science-cell-damage-science

It is common, and encouraged by many journals, for research to be judged by the impact factor of the journal that publishes it. But as a journal's score is an average, it says little about the quality of any individual piece of research. What is more, citation is sometimes, but not always, linked to quality. A paper can become highly cited because it is good science – or because it is eye-catching, provocative or wrong. Luxury-journal editors know this, so they accept papers that will make waves because they explore sexy subjects or make challenging claims. This influences the science that scientists do. It builds bubbles in fashionable fields where researchers can make the bold claims these journals want, while discouraging other important work, such as replication studies.

A link !

http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/07/02/hindawis-scientific-world-journal-loses-its-impact-factor/

Dear Elnesr,

Hemanta Baruah say important point "Nothing can be done about that. "

It is russian proverbialism:

"the dogs bark, but the caravan goes on"

I agree with You, we must eat somsing.

I know one example when journal was lose they IF. It was due to self citation. If ICI will not do this the role of IF will be (not so big now) zero.

So we conclude again "Nothing can be done about that. "

There can be several reasons, such as: the numbers of the journal do not appear in time. The quality of the editorial work deteriorates. Too much self-citation, which is sometimes encouraged by the editors (this is easily spotted by Thomson reuters). If a constant high impact factor is to be maintained only those articles should be accepted which are novel, high quaility. In journal, where I am involved, about 80% of the incoming papers are rejected, about 66% of them is even not submitted to reviewing.

A journal may lose its impact factor if it encourages self-citation (e.g. if authors are strongly suggested to cite 5 articles recently published in this journal or if such a suggestion is made to increase the impact factor of other journals belonging to the same publisher), if its quality goes down (e.g. if its behavior will start resembling 'pay and we'll publish whatever stuff you'll send us' journals) or if it does not manage to publish new volumes regularly.

I agree with Gyorgy, Tiia, and Patrick. It happened to me one time, after my article is accepted for publication, one journal sent me a letter urging me to "enrich" my references by at least 2 of the articles they published! and they sent me a list of 40 related articles!

This journal lost its IF a year after, and even removed entirely from the master journal list of Thompson Reuters.

Hello, the reason for de-listing given by Thompson Reuters are anomalies in citation behaviours. See references here [ http://admin-apps.webofknowledge.com/JCR/static_html/notices/notices.htm ] and [ http://wokinfo.com/media/pdf/jcr-suppression.pdf ]. Interesting that they assume no motive on behalf of the journal. With all that is bad about IF, you have to give them credit for detecting poor publishing practice, and I suppose protecting the integrity of their product. BW Matt

Thank you Matt,

The two main reasons that are mentioned by Thompson Reuters in the pdf file you shared are:

1- Self citation

2- Citation stacking (Donor and Recipient journal pairs)

This is a capture of the 1st reason to benefit the readers

And this is the capture of the second reason that is mentioned by Thompson Reuters:

"Citation stacking"

---Thanks to Matt Holand

An important article regarding this issue:

"The advance and decline of the impact factor" by Sneha Kulkarni

http://www.editage.com/insights/advance-and-decline-impact-factor?nopaging=1

Because the content of papers became low

Prof. Hatem,

The IF is a mathematical measure, and the remaining or removing of journals should be subject to calculations too. The quality of papers cannot be measured directly by computers, but the reviewing process and the citation trend can be assessed.

That's why Thomson Reuters removed many respectful journals as they found signs of fraud by self citations and citation stacking as I discussed in previous posts.

Thank you for your answer,,,

Unfortunately, many small journals show that facet of self citation after our articles already took months of long and arduous process of submission.

As a friend of mine says, "is the kind of things we endure once, because we never give a second chance."

I think this is an excellent discussion. The impact factor was developed with the hope that it would assist readers and authors in understanding how one journal might fit in an assumed hierarchy of journals. In essence, no matter which subject area you address, there is always some appreciation that some journals are "better" and some are "worse". These terms of course are very subjective so the idea is to provide objective criteria by which the quality of the Journal can be assessed. Impact factor is somewhat important in this regard. Other factors such as circulation of the Journal, availability of the Journal and editorial policies of the Journal also factor into this relative assessment.

Self citation is the factor that we hear of most often as a major negative factor. There isn't much that a journal can do about authors who happen to cite specifically from that journal because that is the experience level of the author. The problem comes from the review process whereby a specific journal recommends specific articles from that journal to be included in the reference list. Since the impact factor is affected primarily by recent publications, a reviewer or journal editor that suggests a specific reference that might be older although pertinent may be falling into the category of self citation but at the same time may not benefit from that self citation as it relates to the impact factor.

I often see reviewers making recommendations for references for specific article. For an independent peer reviewer I personally think that that information should not be considered in a negative sense. If the journal however has a group of reviewers who inevitably recommend self citation of recent publications than this indeed is a problem. There certainly are situations where self citation and Cross citation continues to occur without the journals ever being "punished". One probably needs to recognize that there is a threshold below which the Journal is not punished and above which there are specific consequences some as severe as removal of the journal from the master journal list. To my knowledge however I am not aware of that threshold.

Self citations, stacking of citations by 2 journals / publishers mutually, journal becoming irregular, publishing low quality papers, not following peer-reviewing process, publishing plagiarized content, publishing 100% of papers received all contribute to journal's loosing their IF - but I think that after 2 years if these factors are controlled - IF can be regained to some extent

Three basic facts regarding a journal loosing its impact factor are:

1. If it encourages too much self citations from the authors' side.

2. If the reviewer becomes casual about authors committing plagiarism.

3. If the volumes or issues are published on irregular basis.

Some journal lose its impact factor because sometime they want just to make a money and without paying attention to data and quality. They publish fake data, then after detection, they will be deleted from Thomson routers and lose their impact factor. Previous papers that published in those journals then lose their impact as well and not considered. TQ

Do the number of self-citations per journal always reflect fraud?

To prevent the problem of self-citations per journal, the same scientific topic/research domain must be treated by >1 scientific journal. Is there a trade-off between the number of journals treating a scientific topic/research domain and the number of self-citations per journal?

Example:

A high number of journals under the heading 'Ecology' results in a lower number of self-citations per Ecology-related journal versus a lower number of journals under the heading 'Statistics' results in more self-citations per Statistics-related journal.

In academics we often face this problem, eg. we publish in a journal with IF in a certain year, but that journal looses its IF say after a few years due to any of the reasons cited here, now how does the author's work be evaluated??

I feel that the IF of that journal in the year in which the article was published should be taken into account while evaluating author's work and not the year in which the actual evaluation takes place.

Dear K. M.,

Some might argue that the years that your paper have been cited is more important than the year of publication. If your paper is still cited 30 years after the paper has been published, this is impressive, or not?

If you publish in a journal with high reputation, the reputation is built by all contributors, which implies that the contribution of a single publication is often minor.

Dear Marcel, agreed that citation of an article is the best way to judge the quality of a research paper along with its author, but not many organizations follow this rule. It is often easier for them to just take the IF into account to judge an author/ work. My concern was of immediate nature, we in India have a National Academy of Agricultural Science(NAAS), which prepares a score for each journal each year as per Thompson Reuters guidelines, often taking those IFs and then converting them into score on 1-10 scale. They also rate the journals which are not in the list prepared by Thompson Reuters and provide a score based on their own formula.

My concern is that when an author submits his paper to a journal rated highly in NAAS list and which subsequently gets published next year, but if, that journal gets excluded from NAAS list or ISI list , what does the poor author do??

A dropped ISI journal remains ISI journal without IF?

I believe there is an ambiguity here about a journal losing its impact factor due to  committing self-citation. At what level is self-citation deemed to have occurred? At Journal or publisher level? We know that many renowned  publishing companies have various  journals in a particular field. Imagine a situation where articles  predominantely  make reference to  papers  that are published  in different journals of a specific  publishing company. Is this considered the violation of the rules set for self-citation by Thomson Reuters?  This pattern of citation is prevalent in  long-established publishers such as  Elsevier or Springer. In  this scenario, a significant number of  high-quality journals must be deselected from science citation index and lose their impact factors !

Because of they are getting low quality publications, review system is not good and finally this causes  to loose IF. Thus editor must be very careful when he gets submitted paper and decides to sent it to reviewers.