Requiem for impact factors and high publication charges

Figures & data

Figure 1. Number of Scopus records (1983–2019) that include the phrase “journal impact factor” in the title, abstract, or keywords.

Figure 2. Percentage of records in each Scopus Subject Area that include the phrase “journal impact factor” in the title, abstract, or keywords. Subject Areas are grouped as follows by Scopus: Health Sciences (red); Life Sciences (green); Physical Sciences (orange); Social Sciences (purple). The percentage for all Subject Areas combined is shown in blue.

Table 1. Journal impact factor and (some of) its alternatives

Metric	Definition	Detail	Citation source(s)
Journal Impact Factor (JIF)	“The average number of times articles from a journal published in the past two years have been cited in the Journal Citations Report (JCR) year.”^1	JIF 2019 = Number of citations in 2019 to Articles published in 2017 + 2018/Number of articles published in 2017 + 2018.	Journal Citations Reports
CiteScore	“The number of citations to documents (articles, reviews, conference papers, book chapters, and data papers) by a journal over four years, divided by the number of the same document types indexed in Scopus and published in those same four year”2	CiteScore 2019 = Number of citations in 2016–2019/Number of articles published in 2016–2019.	Scopus
Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)	“The ratio of a source’s average citation count per paper and the citation potential of its subject field. The citation potential of a source’s subject field is the average number of references per document citing that source.”3	SNIP 2019 = (Number of citations in 2019 to articles published in 2016–2018/Number of articles published in 2016–2018)/Average number of references per citing document.	Scopus
Eigenfactor	A measure of a journal’s influence in a citation network, based on citations to that journal, iteratively weighted by the importance of the citing journals.4	Uses citations from 2019 to articles from 2014–2018, excluding self-citations.	Journal Citations Reports
ScImago Journal Rank (SJR)	A modified Eigenfactor.4	Uses citations from 2019 to articles published in 2016–2018, limiting self-citations to no more than one third of all citations.	Scopus
h-index	For a given body of articles, h is the largest value for which at least h articles have received at least h citations.^a	Usually applied to authors or journals.	Web of Science; Scopus; Google Scholar
h5-index	A modified h-index.^b	Limited to articles published in the last five calendar years.	Google Scholar

1 https://incites.help.clarivate.com/Content/Indicators-Handbook/ih-journal-impact-factor.htm

2 https://service.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/14880/supporthub/scopus/

3 https://service.elsevier.com/app/answers/list/c/10547/supporthub/scopus/

4 https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/05/15/citation-performance-indicators-short-introduction/

^a(Hirsch 2005)

^bhttps://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/metrics.html#metrics

Hirsch, J. E. 2005. “An Index to Quantify an Individual’s Scientific Research Output.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102 (46): 16569–16572. doi:https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0507655102.

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