My answer may seem unusual but I leave it to my dear RG colleagues to ponder about. In the past, there were more honesty & more freedom in publishing research results. A good paper used to attract attention wherever it is published.

Afterwards, a motto was invented & adopted "Publish or Perish" which was a threat that scared many scholars. This motto facilitated the appearance of journals that will publish any paper (whatever the quality is) for the sake of money & at the same time helped many "scholars" to save their jobs.

Afterwards, the story of impact factors appeared & those who manufactured (I.F) also sought profit. The I.F was made important by a huge effort from those who made themselves custodians or fathers of scientific publications. This is NOT a clean game; you can easily see a journal in a certain field which has I.F of 3.5 but a similar "better" journal in the same field is given I.F of 2.1. It depends, honestly, upon the amount of money paid.

My advice to young scholars: Go ahead with an honest high quality research & publish the results in a journal which doesn't charge high fees & do not care that much about I.F.  If your research is good, many honest scholars will testify to that.

Dear colleagues,

thanks a lot for your helps!

Before some time I send to our colleague Sharma Rao Balakrishnan this to help: You can see on Elsevier

Measuring a journal’s impact

Scopus journal metrics

Understanding the impact of a journal can help you decide whether to submit your article.

Impact per Publication (IPP) is comparable to the Impact Factor, but uses a citation window of three years, which is considered to be the optimal time period to accurately measure citations in most subject fields. Taking into account the same peer-reviewed scholarly papers in both the numerator and denominator of the equation provides a fair impact measurement of the journal and diminishes the chance of manipulation. IPP measures the ratio of citations in a year (Y) to scholarly papers published in the three previous years (Y-1, Y-2, Y-3) divided by the number of scholarly papers published in those same years (Y-1, Y-2, Y-3).

Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) provides a novel bibliometric perspective, correcting for subject-specific characteristics of the field someone is publishing in. This means that, unlike the Impact Factor, SNIP numbers can be compared for any two journals, regardless of the field they are in. SNIP is defined as the ratio of the raw Impact per Publication divided by the Relative Database Citation Potential. The raw Impact per Publication is the same as IPP. The resulting ratio is then divided by the Relative Database Citation Potential.

SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) is based on citation data of the more than 20,000 peer-reviewed journals indexed by Scopus from 1996 onwards. Citations are weighted, depending on the rank of the citing journal: A citation from an important journal will count as more than one citation; a citation coming from a less important journal will count as less than one citation. The SJR of journal J in year X is the number of weighted citations received by J in X to any item published in J in (X-1), (X-2) or (X-3), divided by the total number of articles and reviews published in (X-1), (X-2) or (X-3).

The h-index is a metric for evaluating individual scientists – it rates a scientist's performance based on their career publications, as measured by the lifetime number of citations each article receives. The measurement is dependent on both quantity (number of publications) and quality (number of citations) of an academic's publications. If you list all of a scientist's publications in descending order of the number of citations received to date, their h-index is the highest number of their articles, h, that have each received at least h citations. So, their h-index is 10 if 10 articles have each received at least 10 citations; their h-index is 81 if 81 articles have each received at least 81 citations.

The journal Impact Factor is published every year by Thomson Reuters. It measures the number of times an average paper in a particular journal has been referred to.

The Impact Factor of journal J in the calendar year X is the number of citations received by J in X to any item published in J in (X-1) or (X-2), divided by the number of source items published in J in (X-1) or (X-2). The Impact Factor can be a useful way of comparing citability of journals, but the absolute Impact Factor is of limited use without those of other journals in the field against which to judge it. You can find the most recent Impact Factors of our individual journals on their homepages.

The Five-year Impact Factor is similar in nature to the regular 'two-year' Impact Factor, but instead of counting citations in a given year to the previous two years and dividing by source items in these years, citations are counted in a given year to the previous five years and again divided by the source items published in the previous five years. While still showing changes over time, the five-year measure presents a much smoother variation.

Other journal metrics

Immediacy Index: Published by Thomson Reuters, the Immediacy Index is a measure of the speed at which content in a particular journal is picked up and referred to. The Immediacy Index of journal J in the calendar year X is the number of citations received by J in X to any item published in J in X, divided by the number ofsource items published in J in X.

Cited Half-Life: Published by Thomson Reuters, the Cited Half-Life is a measure of the 'archivability' of content in a particular journal, or of how long content is referred to after publication. The Cited Half-Life of journal J in year X is the number of years after which 50% of the lifetime citations of J's content published in X have been received.

The Eigenfactor and Article Influence are based on data held in Thomson Reuters' Journal Citation Reports. The Eigenfactor of journal J in year X is defined as the percentage of weighted citations received by J in X to any item published in (X-1), (X-2), (X-3), (X-4), or (X-5), out of the total citations received by all journals in the dataset. Only citations received from a journal other than J are counted. Article Influence is calculated by dividing the Eigenfactor by the percentage of all articles recorded in the Journal Citation Reports that were published in J. Article Influence is therefore conceptually similar to the Impact Factor and SCImago Journal Rank.

How is impact factor calculated? - ResearchGate. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_is_impact_factor_calculated [accessed Dec 23, 2015].

So, I know all those that you send to me! Okay, I needed your comments why is impostant for one scintific journal?

All of you I wish a happy Christmas and a Happy New Year 2016!

My answer may seem unusual but I leave it to my dear RG colleagues to ponder about. In the past, there were more honesty & more freedom in publishing research results. A good paper used to attract attention wherever it is published.

Afterwards, a motto was invented & adopted "Publish or Perish" which was a threat that scared many scholars. This motto facilitated the appearance of journals that will publish any paper (whatever the quality is) for the sake of money & at the same time helped many "scholars" to save their jobs.

Afterwards, the story of impact factors appeared & those who manufactured (I.F) also sought profit. The I.F was made important by a huge effort from those who made themselves custodians or fathers of scientific publications. This is NOT a clean game; you can easily see a journal in a certain field which has I.F of 3.5 but a similar "better" journal in the same field is given I.F of 2.1. It depends, honestly, upon the amount of money paid.

My advice to young scholars: Go ahead with an honest high quality research & publish the results in a journal which doesn't charge high fees & do not care that much about I.F.  If your research is good, many honest scholars will testify to that.

Prof. Nizar, I sincerely understand your concern.I fully endorse your advice to believe in the quality of one's research and not the IF of a journal, as a quality research / scientific work is here to stay!

although I had reservations of my own on IF grading of a journal, but as like most of you, i  do get carried away sometimes. There are few things which bothers me about the IF thing

The system of certification of a journal based on Impact Factor is not a standardized / flawless one to begin with! As there  is a general tendency on the part of a citing individual to be influenced by the already indicated IF. 

Impact factors and citation analysis in general are affected by field-dependent factors. which may invalidate comparisons not only across disciplines but even within different fields of research of one discipline. For example, the % of citations for mathematical sciences and biological sciences will have very significant differences. Thus,it is impossible to compare journals using impact factors either across disciplines or allied fields within a discipline.

the validity of the impact factor as a measure of journal importance and the effect of policies that editors may adopt to boost their impact factor is controversial in itself!

 And finally, IF is based on arithmetic mean number of citations, and the citation counts follow Bradford distribution which makes the arithmetic mean a statistically inappropriate measure!!

Regards

Rathish

Impact factor measure the importance of scientific journals in the field of research specialization, but the opportunity for publication in international journals is not neutral because of the financial and language problem in published research? In addition there are a lot of valued magazines in third world and contain valued researches, but do not register globally