What Is Impact Factor In A Journal And How It Can Be Calculated?

Metrics have become an everyday word in terms of scholarship. Within its fields of research, they provide important data regarding a journal’s impact as well as relevance among its readers. In this era of information proliferation, it has important to know where to capture the most attention in order to target more audience. Whenever you are in doubt regarding which journal suits you, don’t forget to browse its metrics. The metrics help you with the decision-making process.

Impact Factor Meaning

Impact factor is also known as journal impact factor that refers to the scient metric index. It indicates the annual average number of citations that research-based articles presented in the last two years. Impact factor is usually used as a substitute in order to determine the relative importance of a journal with the greater impact factor are considered as having significance and credibility as compared to journals that have lower impact factor.

What Is A Good Impact Factor For A Scientific Journal?

Impact Factors are significantly used to measure the importance of a journal. It is calculated by the number of times articles are cited within a particular year. However, the higher the number of citations coming from a journal, or impact factor, the higher it is ranked. We can also say that an impact factor is a powerful tool if there’s need to compare journals in the subject category.

Difference Between Impact Factor And Cite Score

There’s a great need to know that all the journals indexed in Scopus have cite score whereas, all the journals indexed in Web of science have impact factor as the quality metric. Furthermore, impact factor is not known for comparison between or across various academic disciplines as the citation rate is different based on subject hierarchy.

How Impact Factor Is Calculated?

Impact factor is used as a scale in order to evaluate the quality as well as importance of an academic journal. It indicates the number of reference as well as proposed articles cited for validating research. We can also say that an Impact factor works as the parameter for underlining the relative significance of a scientific journal and it is done to calculate the frequency of articles in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR).

Measuring an impact factor of journals has been in practice since 1975, covering academic and scientific journal listed in the JCR. Keep in consideration, if any published article is cited one time, it represents the impact factor on a scale of 1.0. however, if published article is cited 4 times, the scale denotes the impact factor of 4.0. Journals with high impact factors are remarkable as compared to the journals with lower impact factor.

This listing and ranking of scholarly journals in their respective fields are based on the level of impact factor the journals earned. In simple meaning, impact factor is a scale to evaluate the relevance of scientific journals based on the citation frequency with the purpose to make comparison possible.