Impact factor

Recently, a system for evaluating the effectiveness of scientific work of both individual scientists and organizations in which they work has been formed. It is based on scientometric indicators, among which the main one is the citation index of publications in scientific journals. And since journals play a key role in this system, the rating of journals is important for choosing the publication of an article. The impact factor is used to determine the place in it of a particular publication. Understanding its meaning will help graduate students and applicants, for whom the publication of scientific articles in VAK journals is an urgent task, to avoid mistakes in choosing a journal.

What is the impact factor?

The impact factor is a scientometric numerical indicator of the scientific significance of a journal. It is made up of the following citation scores: the number of citations to articles published in a journal divided by the total number of articles in that journal over a given period of time.

For the first time, the impact factor was proposed to be taken for calculations by the Institute for Scientific Information (USA), then it was the Web of Science (WoS), in the 60s of the last century. This project was developed under the leadership of WoS founder Dr. Eugene Garfield.

Since then, many techniques have emerged, almost all of them based on citation counts. The most popular and authoritative methodology for calculating the impact factor belongs to Thompson Reuters, and the impact factor itself is placed in the “Journal Citation Report”. The same calculation method is used in the RSCI.

But the RSCI calculates the impact factor only for domestic scientific journals, journals published abroad in Russian, and foreign journals that have an agreement with the Scientific Electronic Library (eLibrary.ru).

How is the impact factor calculated?

This technique is based on the calculation of data on references to the journal for the previous period. That is, the number of references for a given year to publications in the journal for the previous period (two to five years), correlated with the number of articles in the journal during this time.

For example, you need to calculate the impact factor of a journal for 2015. To do this, all references to journal articles for 2013 and 2014 in all publications of the RSCI database are taken and divided by the number of journal articles for these two years.

Pros and Cons of the Impact Factor

In order to publish an article in a scientific journal, one should not focus only on the impact factor when choosing a publication, since its high value is not a full guarantee of its high quality.

Recently, there has been a deliberate misrepresentation of this indicator among journal publishers and individual scientists. The methods of artificially inflating the impact factor include self-citation, mutual exchange of links by agreement between authors and journals, selling citations and publishing an underestimated number of articles (the more articles, the lower the impact factor, since not all articles are cited).

Therefore, the impact factor should be considered along with other indicators of the RSCI. Particular attention should be paid to the self-citation rate and the Herfindahl index for the journal. The higher these figures (self-citation index over 40%, and the Herfindahl index over 1500), the lower the level of these journals.

In addition, the magnitude of the impact factor is highly dependent on the field of scientific research. For example, medical journals have higher impact factors than mathematical ones.

For a more objective assessment of the scientific significance of the journal, the Science Index is used. This is a generalized indicator that is calculated on the basis of the RSCI and allows you to more accurately determine the place of a publication in the ranking of scientific journals.

In general, the impact factor is a good criterion in assessing the level and quality of a journal suitable for publishing a scientific article. A list of journals with an indication of the impact factor can be found on the website of the Scientific Electronic Library (NEB).