How representative is the journal impact factor?

Abstract

The journal impact factor (the mean citedness of a journal's articles) is a characteristic journal property that stays relatively constant over time. However, within each journal the citedness of the individual articles form an extremely skewed distribution, regardless of journal impact. The journal impact factor is, therefore, not representative of the individual article, and cannot be used as a proxy measure of article citedness except when large (50–100 articles), random samples of articles are pooled. Articles by individual authors form equally skewed distributions, resulting in poor correlation between article citedness and journal impact even at the author level. Highly cited and less cited authors differ consistently in citedness, maintaining a relatively constant citedness ratio at all journal impact levels. The present data thus provide no support for the widespread contention that journal status, as measured by journal impact, may contribute to article citedness independently of the properties of the article.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 62 citations exist upstream.