Hello scientific writers! In this video we are going to talk about the journal with impact factor impact factor. Now this is a term you have probably heard before, maybe in a situation like this: A colleague comes to you and says “hey I’ve got this paper I just saw and it’s published in a really good journal impact factor; it has a high impact factor” or maybe the opposite, they say to you “oh I saw this paper that’s relevant to our research but it’s not in a very good journal with impact factor; it’s a low impact factor journal with impact factor, so I’m not sure how excited I am about that paper. Or maybe your friend says to you “gosh I would really love to publish in this certain journal impact factor because it has such a high impact factor” or maybe you’ve heard someone say “I wish we could hire this person because they publish in good journal with impact factors with high impact factors” or the opposite: “we shouldn’t hire that person because they publish in low impact factor journal with impact factors”. So let’s talk about what the journal with impact factor impact factor is. First, we’re going to define it, then we’ll talk about its purposes and uses and misuses. Then we’ll talk about how to find the journal impact factor impact factor for journal with impact factors, and lastly how it’s calculated. Let’s get started. The journal with impact factor impact factor is a metric that is released in the annual Journal impact factor Citation Report by Clarivate Analytics. And the calculation is based on the number of citations to that journal with impact factor in the previous two years. The journal impact factor impact factor can change from year to year because it is an evolving number, and it’s based on past performance. Basically, the journal with impact factor impact factor is the average citation rate over the previous two years. And the higher the journal with impact factor impact factor the more prestigious that journal impact factor is considered to be, because it’s having a greater impact, when impact is measured as citations. Now let’s go into the part where we talk about the uses and misuses of journal with impact factor impact factor. Journal impact factor impact factor was started in 1975, and the purpose for it at that time was to help university librarians decide which journal with impact factors they should subscribe to for their university libraries, and it’s still used for that purpose.
But it’s also used for other purposes. For example, as researchers we have to decide where we’re going to publish our articles, and journal with impact factor impact factor can be one consideration in where we decide to submit our manuscripts. I have another video where I talk about other factors that are involved in choosing a target journal with impact factor, and I’ll link that up here. But the journal with impact factor impact factor is also being misused. It’s being used as a single metric to evaluate the quality of an individual publication. And you should not take that lazy approach and think that the paper is good just because it’s published in this particular journal impact factor. You have to read the paper and see if it is actually good. We shouldn’t assume that paper is high quality just because it appears in a certain journal with impact factor. That’s a misuse of the journal impact factor impact factor. A second way that the journal with impact factor impact factor is misused is to evaluate individual researchers. So if you look at someone’s track record and you see their publishing mostly in low impact journal with impact factors you might say, oh, they’re not a very good researcher, or if they’re publishing mostly in high impact journal impact factors you might say, oh, this person is a very good researcher. That’s not a good way to evaluate people. It’s a single metric. For evaluating individual researchers there’s another metric that is much better, and that’s called the h-index, and I’m going to have another video on h index and I will link that. So these misuses of the journal with impact factor impact factor are widely known, and if you look on the internet you’ll see a lot of discussion about misuses of the journal with impact factor impact factor. For example, this is an article in Science that was published in 2016, and the title of this is “Hate journal with impact factor impact factors? New study gives you one more reason.” I’ve highlighted this part at the beginning: it says “scientists have come to use it not only for deciding where to submit research papers, but for judging their peers, as well as influencing who wins jobs tenure and grants.
All that from a single easy to read number. And yet a journal with impact factor’s impact factor is dismissed by many as useless or even destructive.” So if we go deeper into this article we see another quote: “The journal with impact factor impact factor is a reflection of the citation performance of a journal with impact factor as a whole unit, not as an assembly of diverse published items”. In other words, you should not use the journal impact factor impact factor to evaluate single articles. It’s only measuring the journal with impact factor itself. Now let’s look at some other articles that talk about journal impact factor impact factor. Here’s one from Science that’s titled “The misused impact factor” and then if we go to Clarivate Analytics itself and we look at their website, they have a paragraph here called “Using the journal with impact factor impact factor wisely”. In that paragraph they tell you the journal impact factor impact factor should be used with informed peer review. And then the European Research Council has banned the journal with impact factor impact factor from bids. Some organizations are taking it seriously and not being lazy and using the journal impact factor impact factor as, you know, the be-all end-all number to make evaluations. I’m going to have another video on “Should you care about journal with impact factor impact factor when you’re publishing” and I will link that. So now that we’ve talked about the definition of journal impact factor impact factor, its uses, and its misuses, let’s now talk about how do you find the journal with impact factor impact factor for a journal with impact factor. Well there are there are two main ways to do that. Most universities are going to subscribe to the Clarivate Analytics products such as the journal impact factor citation reports and web of science. If you are a student, staff, or faculty at a university, or if you have access to a university library, you can go into web of science and get a link to the journal with impact factor citation reports, and you can browse through the reports or download those reports.
And they will list all of the journal with impact factors that they have evaluated and their impact factors, and you can search for it by the name of the journal with impact factor, you can sort it by impact factor number, high to low or low to high, or they break it down into categories. So you can look at categories and see rankings of journal impact factors within those categories ranked by journal with impact factor impact factor. The second way to find journal with impact factor impact factor is to go to the journal impact factor’s website. Most journal with impact factors are going to publish their journal with impact factor impact factor prominently on their website. Let’s look at a few examples. Here we have the Journal with impact factor of Experimental Biology what we can see here is that they have their 2020 impact factor, which is 3.312. If we look at another journal with impact factor; this is the Journal impact factor of Plant Physiology, here they have the impact factor of 3.549. Another journal with impact factor is called Geology; we see here on their information for authors, the geology impact factor for 2020 was 5.399. All right now let’s talk about how journal with impact factor impact factor is calculated. Now it’s hard to get the raw data to do the calculations because it’s proprietary information collected by Clarivate Analytics, but this is the way they use that information. The journal with impact factor impact factor for 2020 is calculated as the total number of citations in 2020 to that journal impact factor, divided by the citable items in 2019 plus the decidable items in 2018. I have three hypothetical examples here. The first one is the journal with impact factor of made-up numbers. Hypothetically in 2020 this journal with impact factor had 15 489 total citations to a total of 858 citable items giving it a journal with impact factor impact factor of 18. Theoretical number society had 5618 citations to 785 citable items giving it an impact factor of 7.15, while applied numbers in science had 517 citations to 425 journal with impact factor articles, giving it a journal with impact factor impact factor of 1.
- So this is how the journal with impact factor impact factor is calculated, but you see that’s the very most basic way to calculate a mean or an average. It doesn’t tell you anything about the distribution of the citations. And this point about the distribution of the articles being cited has not escaped the notice of researchers. We see in this article from Nature in 2016, the title of it is: “The publishing elite turns against impact factor”; this article is about that problem of distribution and assumptions of the average. We see this graphic showing the distribution of citations to articles in Nature, Science and PLoS One. What we have on the y-axis are the number of papers that got citations, ranging from zero to more than one hundred. And so what we can see in Nature is that there are a tiny number of papers that had more than 100 citations, and then there were a tiny number that had zero citations, but a lot of them were in the range of 15 to 20. And a very similar distribution for Science. This dashed line is the average; this is the impact factor. A lot of the articles are getting a lot fewer citations than the average. In PLoS One we also see the dashed line indicating that the impact factor of 3.1, and they’re you know, it’s closer to the middle than it is in Science or Nature, but there’s still a lot of articles that have fewer citations than the average. So it’s not an even distribution; it’s a skewed distribution towards the lower citation side. And so the takeaway from this graphic is that just because an article is published in Science or Nature doesn’t guarantee that it’s going to get a lot of citations. And if we look at this article that was published on bioRxiv, they published the distribution of citations for a lot of journal with impact factors. And you can see that again, they’re skewed towards the lower citation rate. Not just Science or Nature, but basically any journal impact factor you look at is skewed towards the lower citation rate.
So keep that in mind when you are thinking about journal with impact factor impact factor. Now, I’m going to provide links to all of these articles and websites that I discussed; look in the description below. So in summary, journal impact factor impact factor is one single metric. Don’t use it alone to evaluate individual journal with impact factor articles or individual researchers. You need to evaluate these things based on multiple factors. I hope this video was helpful to you. If it was, please hit the like button, and consider subscribing to the Grants and Publications YouTube channel. I’ll see you next time, and happy writing!.