The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric factor based on the yearly average number of citations on articles published by a particular journal in the last two years. In other words, the impact factor of 2020 is the average of the number of cited publications divided by the citable publications of a journal. A journal impact factor is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field. Normally, journals with higher impact factors are often deemed to have more influence than those with lower ones. However, the science community has also noted that review articles typically are more citable than research articles.
Find out more: What is a good impact factor?
And check out: How to get published in a top science journal?
Any journal impact factor or scientometric indicator alone will not give you the full picture of a science journal. That’s why every year, scholars review current metrics to improve upon them and sometimes come up with new ones. There are also other factors to sider for example, H-Index, Self-Citation Ratio, SJR (SCImago Journal Rank Indicator) and SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper). Researchers may also consider the practical aspect of a journal such as publication fees, acceptance rate, review speed.
The h-index is an author-level metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a scientist or scholar. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR indicator) is a measure of scientific influence of scholarly journals that accounts for both the number of citations received by a journal and the importance or prestige of the journals where such citations come from.
scijournal.org is a platform dedicated to making the search and use
of impact factors of science journals easier.
