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UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

Scholarly Communication

About Traditional Metrics

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Traditional metrics help authors track citation patterns. Common metrics include:

  • Citation Counts: the number of citations for an article, author, or academic journal.
  • H-Index: a measure of author productivity (number of published papers) and impact (number of citations).
  • Impact factor (IF): a measure of the annual frequency with which the average journal article has been cited in a given year.

The resources below can help you learn how to understand and manage these metrics.

Calculating Journal Impact Factors

How Impact Factor is Calculated?

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.

Calculation of 2020 Impact Factor of a journal:

A = the number of times articles published in 2018 and 2019 were cited by indexed journals during 2020.
B = the total number articles and reviews published in 2018 and 2019.
 
A/B = 2020 impact factor

Journal Impact Factor: Strengths and Limitations

Strengths

  • offers a global picture of internationally influential journals
  • is recognized in the community of scholars
  • relies on a simple calculation
  • widely available and has been employed for many years
  • particularly helpful in estimating the recent performance of a journal

Criticisms

  • impact factor was never intented to measure the performance of individual researchers and papers
  • not sufficient to capture how influential a journal is
  • relies on a skewed distribution, or the 80/20 rule: a small percentage of the papers accounts for a very large portion of the influence
  • review journals have an advantage over non-review journals
  • impact factors vary across disciplines and cross-field comparisons are not possible

 

Pendlebury, D. (2009). The use and misuse of journal metrics and other citation indicators. Archivum Immunologiae et Therapiae Experimentalis, 57 (1), 1-11.

Citation Metrics Tools

Journal Impact Resources

  • Counts citations to journals in both the sciences and social sciences.
  • Eliminates self-citations. Every reference from one article in a journal to another article from the same journal is discounted.
  • Weighs each reference according to a measure of the amount of time researchers spend reading the journal.