Authors: Christopher F Blanford
Publish Date: 2016/08/12
Volume: 51, Issue: 23, Pages: 10319-10322
Abstract
This past July an international team of researchers and publishers published a proposal that academic journals share their citation distributions to encourage authors publishers and institutions to look beyond using single numerical metrics for an entire journal as a proxy for the research quality of individual articles in it 1 We embrace this effort and include the citation distribution that contributed to this Journal’s 2015 Thomson Reuters Impact FactorA journal impact factor JIF is a simple ratio The numerator is the number of citations a journal receives in a particular calendar year to ‘citable items’ with a publication date from the previous two years the ‘citation window’ The denominator is the number of citable items in that citation window Citable items include reviews and original research which Thomson Reuters classify as ‘articles’ Editorials such as this one are classified as ‘editorial material’ and are not counted in the denominator Although the classification protocol has been defined 2 there is still a lot of grey area 31 particularly in publications that fall somewhere between scientific journals and society membership magazines2Distribution of citations from articles published in 2015 to articles published in the Journal of Materials Science in 2013 and 2014 volumes 49 and 50 The orange segments at the top of each column represent the contribution from document types such as reviews or editorial content
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