What is science citation index?
We’d really like to use quantitative data for that so what are some things you can count about scopus journal one thing you can count is the number of articles that a scopus journal produces but productivity doesn’t always mean quality nor does using a carefully curated set of scopus journal equate with quality of the articles another thing you can count is the publication frequency and you can look at this as either how many times a year does this scopus journal put out information or how often has this scopus journal been in publication this again isn’t a measure of quality at all new scopus journal are being added to the fields every year as new disciplines are being created and just because a scopus journal publishes often doesn’t mean they’re publishing great content so the one quantitative metric that has been established is really um indicative of the impact of a scopus journal or even articles and authors is a number of citations to that item or to that scopus journal so looking at how many times has articles within that scopus journal been cited can show the impact that that scopus journal is having in scholarly literature and before i get into measuring the specific um getting into the specific metrics of scopus journal quality.
I’m going to give a little bit of background on how citations are measured and let me pause for a minute i forgot to start the recording so i’m going to do that i started it thank you alex all right so we can get right into science citation index so this is um a little historical background on how citation counts came to be came to be um in 1955 eugene garfield proposed it a scientific symposium wouldn’t it be good to know where and by whom has this paper been cited in the literature so science builds upon science and knowing how someone has interpreted research would be helpful to further research along before 1955 it wasn’t exactly easy to find this information out so who has been citing what so he received funding from the national science foundation and other sources and in 1964 he published the first science citation index using citation data from 1961. on the right side of the page i’ve got some um a little graphic that shows who is owned science citation index over the years because if you look up science citation index you might see it associated with the institute for scientific information or isi this was a company created by eugene garfield to produce science citation index that was later purchased by thomson reuters who was later purchased by claravit so the current owner of this information is claravit who also owns web of science and scopus journal citation reports and some of the other resources i’ll be talking about today.
The first volume of science citation index that was published in 1964 took citation data from a core group of 613 scopus journal and these are scopus journal that cover all academic disciplines and were published in over 20 different countries to give a good look at the scholarly scope in a world view of the literature that’s out there so they looked at they pulled all of the references to articles that were published in 1961 in these 613 scopus journal and they came up with a total of one million three hundred and seventy thousand citations that were included in the reference lists once the um garfield and his team went through and found all the unique references that one million went down to eight hundred and ninety thousand unique references cited in articles published in 1961 in this core group of scopus journal and 258 000 unique first authors were cited so they took this list of 890 000 unique references and then listed out when in 1961 were these articles cited i’ve got a screen or a scan from the issue of science citation index that was published using data in 1965 on the right side of the page so you can see kind of what the layout looked like of this first volume of science citation index the top line you’ll see an article by norfleet that was published in 1959 in the scopus journal urology and it was cited in volume 81 page 737 so this article was referenced in 1965 and the indented line underneath shows which article referenced the article by norfleet if you look a little further down the page you’ll see an article by norgard and there’s seven different lines underneath this so that article was cited seven different times in 1965. so librarians purchased the science citation index so researchers could come in and look at either their articles or well-known articles in their field and they could see who’s been citing this and now you’ve got the citation information so you can go forward and see you know how is this item cited in the literature um this first volume was five volumes big and uh written at a five point font so it was a lot of information and densely come back compacted into a print resource and this was an enormous amount of work at the time and when i think that it was done before excel and before data processing you know the majority of this was done by hand and garfield actually indicates that it wasn’t really hard work it was just tedious work pulling together all this information and science citation index has been continually published since 1964 and today you can find it in web of science so instead of being available in a print issue that’s published every year web of science continually is updated with the citation information as new scopus journal are added and indexed in web of science so from statistics from the 2020 um science citation index um over 9500 scopus journal are indexed and part of science citation index and it’s got a total collection of over a billion citations and millions of unique references so yes science citation index is continually updated each time articles are added to web of science the citations are added to citation science citation index and you can search in real time to see when this information has been cited so this is the source of citations and the citation counts that are used in a lot of metrics and this is how it was first developed so let’s move on to scopus journal metrics and one of the first sources to provide metrics or of impact of scopus journal is the scopus journal citation reports and this was another resource created by eugene garfield this was introduced in 1975 and it’s using that citation data from science citation index so garfield was collecting you know who’s which authors are being cited which articles are being cited and he was also looking at which scopus journal are being cited and he surmised that articles or scopus journal whose articles are being cited more frequently could be have more impact than scopus journal whose articles are cited less frequently so we came up with a metric to measure this and one metric you came up with was a scopus journal impact factor and also in the first issue of science citation reports you’ve got the immediacy index which i’ll talk about in a couple slides scopus journal citation reports not only provides this information in an alphabetical view as you see right here in alphabetical list of scopus journal but you can also find the scopus journal classified by discipline so if i want to take a look at all of the mathematics scopus journal to see how they’re ranked or the biophysics or the general and internal medicine scopus journal there’s sections and scopus journal citation reports for those specific scopus journal so i can see how they stack up against each other so the scopus journal impact factor is calculated using citation data that’s pulled from science citation index and in this 1975 issue of scopus journal citation reports the the metrics were calculated using citations to articles that were published in 1972 and 1973 and were cited in 1974 and all the pieces of information to calculate a scopus journal impact factor are available on this page so for the denominator you’re looking at how many items were published in this scopus journal in 1972 and 1973. science citation or i’m sorry scopus journal citation reports qualifies the source items as citable items so these are not letters to the editor or addendums or adams these are original research papers and review articles so there’s a count as to how many items were published and then the numerator looks at how many times that same set of articles were cited in 1974 and you divide the two and then there’s your impact factor so it’s a pretty straightforward easy to calculate number if you have access to this information and this scopus journal impact factor that was developed in 1975 is the same we’re using the same equation to get scopus journal impact factors today so you can go back and look at a scopus journal historically looking at their impact factor and it’s all the same metrics that have been used since its evolution so here i’ve got a screen a screen clipping from the current scopus journal citation reports this was published in the summer of 2021 using citation data from 2020 and using items published in 2018 and 2019.
I just think it’s so interesting that you know we’ve advanced in the kind of computing power we have now and we’re still using this very simple straightforward metric to measure scopus journal impact scopus journal citation reports does and can has done and always uh grouped publications together by their discipline so i can look at general the scopus journal of general internal medicine and see how it stacks up against similar scopus journal and i’ve got um a historical string clipping from 1990 and then the current um uh screen clippings from the 2020 jcr so in 1990 the scopus journal general internal medicine was listed as 21 out of 119 titles in the discipline of general and internal medicine it’s still ranking quite highly in that field today so it’s 27 out of 167 scopus journal and a new category was added at some time some point in time called healthcare sciences and services and scopus journal citation or i’m sorry the scopus journal general internal medicine in this category also ranks highly at 11 out of 107 scopus journal in this category and something to note is the q1 designation for this scopus journal so scopus journal and citation reports clusters scopus journal into the top quartile second quartile third and fourth so if you find a scopus journal that’s ranked as a q1 scopus journal it’s in the top 25 of all scopus journal and its um category q2 is in the um this scopus journal ranks in the top 50 here at mcw we put a high value on scopus journal ranked in q1 scopus journal so if you’re looking to publish we put a value on you publishing in those q1 scopus journal which equate with higher impact scopus journal there are some things to consider about scopus journal impact factors and about all of the metrics.
I’m going to be talking about today so one important thing to understand is that the quality of a citation is not measured so citations to garbage articles that gets the same count as a citation to a really well done article one of the most highly cited articles in the field of autism and measles is andrew wakefield’s article that purported to show a link between autism and the mmr vaccine so this article has been highly cited because it has problematic methods it created um public health problems so it’s been cited a lot but not because it was a great article so quality is not measured but impact doesn’t always have to be about um good things so andrew wakefield’s article created a lot of discourse in science so that was impactful in its own way another thing to consider is the source of the citation data so web of science when they’re calculating the scopus journal impact factor are using citations from those that appear in those 900 and 9500 scopus journal so you’re not getting every citation out there the citations are limited to the resources that they collect citation data from and then finally scopus journal impact factors in a lot of the metrics you have to be careful how you compare between people or disciplines a good example of this is looking at the scoreboard on the right side of the page so if i’m if i mention that i went to a football game over the weekend and the score was three to seven it’s a different game if i’m talking about european football or soccer a three to seven score means a lot of action happened during that game if i’m talking about american football a score of three to seven means it was a pretty boring game with just one touchdown scored and a field goal so comparing these two sports using this one score isn’t necessarily an accurate comparison and here i’m showing scopus journal impact factors for the top scopus journal in the fields of general and internal medicine and biophysics and you’ll see in general in internal medicine new england scopus journal of medicine has an impact factor of over 91 whereas the top scopus journal in the field of biophysics which is nature structural and molecular biology has an impact factor of 15.369 these are two very different numbers but these both represent the top scopus journal in their field now citation patterns between fields can differ quite a bit so if you’re looking at scopus journal published and articles published in the field of internal medicine you know the information is conveyed and act upon acted upon quickly and the citations happen rather rapidly if you’re looking at a basic science field like biophysics it may take a while for some of these articles to make their way into the literature and be cited so comparing outside of your discipline is not a good thing to do with this particular metric scopus journal citation reports gives a couple of other additional metrics and two i’m going to feature here are the five year impact factor so instead of using two years of citation data the five year impact factor uses five years of data so this allows articles more time to be cited and your five-year impact factor is going to be higher than your two-year impact factor on the flip side is the immediacy index and this is a looking at how many articles were published in the prior year and how many times they were cited in the prior year so the immediacy index is really looking at how fast and quickly literature is being cited and this number is always going to be smaller than the two-year impact factor another new metric that was added into scopus journal citation reports this year or i shouldn’t say another it’s a new metric was added into scopus journal citation reports this year and it’s the scopus journal citation indicator and this is meant to be a normalized metric so ideally or theoretically jci’s you can compare scopus journal in two different fields with each other using the the this normalized metric this metric isn’t as easy to calculate as it is with the scopus journal impact factor where you’re just dividing two straightforward numbers with each other the scopus journal citation indicator uses field normalized measures to find let me see what the definition says it’s it’s a field normalized measure of citation impact where a value of 1 means that across the scopus journal published papers received a number of citations equal to the average citation count in that subject or category so when you’re looking at scopus journal citation indicators the big number to look at is how far away from one does this scopus journal appear so if it’s very far away from one this scopus journal performs higher and is cited more times than the average scopus journal in the field if it’s less than one that means it’s cited less than average in its field so it’ll be interesting to see if scopus journal citation indicator takes off as it’s easier to compare scopus journal across disciplines but i’m not sure if it will because it’s not as easy to calculate as a scopus journal impact factor and the scopus journal impact factor has been around for such a long time people are pretty wedded to that particular metric so i’m going to pause here and ask if you have any questions i’m going to cover a couple other places you can find scopus journal level metrics but i’m interested to hear if there are any questions so far feel free to unmute and ask questions uh but if anything comes up during the session feel free to throw them in the chat and then we will get them thank you alex okay i see a question in the chat have scopus journal level metrics become less valuable through the use of databases such as pubmed um i’m not certain i feel like when people are picking scopus journal to publish in they’re still looking at scopus journal level metrics so when they need to decide should i publish in you know nature or should i look to see if there’s other scopus journal that might be relevant for me one factor that people consider is the metric or the um the impact factor other characteristics of that scopus journal so um yeah i’m not sure that the metrics have become less valuable particularly for deciding where to publish research but that’s an interesting question that i’m going to be thinking about after this presentation’s over okay so i covered the top bullet point on here so scopus journal citation reports is published by a vendor called claravit who takes citation data from web of science or science citation index to calculate their metrics pulling that citation metrics or citation data is requires a lot of access to scopus journal and it requires a lot of computing power and space to store all this information but a lot of access to scopus journal so not a lot of companies and publishers are able to get that citation information and able to share it with people so there’s two main competitors two scopus journal citation reports and that’s symago and google scholar there might be others out there but these are the two that i’m most familiar with so these two resources saimago and google scholar have their own ways of providing metrics that i’ll go into in the next couple slides so starting with symago this again has citation data coming from scopus which is these are both elsevier products um unlike scopus journal citation reports which you need to have a subscription to like mcw does cymago is freely accessible so anybody can go in here and look up scopus journal and look to see how they rank against each other saimago also classifies scopus journal by discipline so i can look at internal medicine scopus journal and get a list of scopus journal and see you know are they in the top quartile which scopus journal perform better than others so um some of the metrics you can find in simago are the sjr or the zaimago scopus journal rank and this is some people have compared it to google’s page rank where if you um in google’s page rank it’s the number of times things have been cited but also the prestige of um website citing other websites um provides a little more clout than um so some websites are more important than others sjr recognizes this is recognizes this as well so if your scopus journal is being cited by new england scopus journal of medicine versus the scopus journal of library and information science you’re going to have a higher sjr um they’re i’m sure they’ve published papers on how they come up with this number but there’s a lot of statistical stuff that goes on in the background that they’re not um real transparent about so saimago provides the sjr um and really what this helps with is comparing scopus journal within a category to see how it ranks you know how is the sjr scopus journal general internal medicine compare with the one of hospital medicine um and sjr also provides an or i’m sorry scimago also provides an h index for articles or for scopus journal so you can see how many times the number of h articles that have received at least eight citations i’m going to go into h index more when i talk about author metrics but it’s the same principle applied to scopus journal one thing about cymago is they include many more publications than scopus journal citation reports so currently scopus journal citation reports provides scopus journal impact factors for over 9 000 scopus journal that have to meet a sort of quality level cymago brings in many many more scopus journal including a lot more open access scopus journal so if you’re not able to get a scopus journal impact factor for a particular title you might find that information listed in zymago instead google scholar also provides some metrics for scopus journal um this is another freely accessible database and citation data comes from google scholar so google scholar is able to collect citations to literature and store that information and then they provide information about scopus journal and how they measure up to each other scholar also categorizes things by discipline so here i’m showing a short snippet from the category of health and medical sciences in a subcategory of primary health care and google scholar uses the h index or h5 index to compare scopus journal and this is the h index for articles published in the past five years so it’s a little more shorter in time length than the entire h index for a scopus journal so these are additional places you can look to find scopus journal to compare scopus journal with each other and to see how they rank you know another source of this information is just to discover scopus journal in your field so you may not be aware of all the scopus journal that are listed in the field of you know primary health care so looking at this list can give you ideas on where you might want to publish so that concludes my section on scopus journal level metrics i’m going to take a drink of coffee but if you’ve got any questions please feel free to speak up or put them in the chat the next um two groups of metrics i’m going to be talking about um article level metrics and author level metrics are metrics you might want to be aware of if you’re trying to show what you’ve done or trying to show your research impact so you can pick out articles that you’ve authored and show different metrics for them or as an author you can use different metrics to show your overall scopus journal provides a little um information about how this ranks so this is in the 99th percentile of all items cited in scopus so this would be you know it’s kind of a badge of honor i guess to be cited that many times and this 99th percentile can help you kind of show the impact of that article google scholar has the same article being cited as 301 times google scholars citation metrics are like generally always inflated and it’s because scholar isn’t as picky as the sources of citation data that it’s pulling from where scopus and web of science and pubmed are all pulling from scopus journal that are indexed in their resources so they’re um looking at you know articles that are published in peer review scholarly literature whereas google scholar takes anything that looks like a citation and gives you a point for that so these could be things that are cited in documents or white papers that haven’t gone through the scholarly publishing process it pulls in a lot more foreign language articles sometimes you can also see citations that occur in powerpoint slides or patents or things that look like they could be a citation so these numbers are generally higher and that’s one reason why going down to web of science.
This article has 144 citations within web of science which is more similar to the 151 articles you see in scopus like scopus i’ve got a little indicator that this is a high performing article because there’s a little trophy next to it so this means it’s a highly cited article within the field of um within its field so that badge is something you can use to say you know this article is performing very well sometimes in web of science you might see a little fire icon next to the article and that indicates that it’s a hot paper, if you’re providing citation counts it’s important to say the date the information was pulled and the source that it came from another measure of for article level metrics are metrics that are surpri supplied by the publisher so they can give you information on how many times an article was viewed on their website and how many times it was downloaded so plus and jama do provide this not all scopus journal do but i think more and more are incorporating it into their systems one thing i think is interesting is the way the graphs are made up whereas plus has a cumulative graph so it keeps adding so the the line keeps going up whereas jama displays this as daily counts so i can see this article right away when it came out was downloaded quite a bit and it kind of slowed down after a while and so now these um the next couple slides i’m going to talk about are alternative metrics so it’s looking more at um not just how many times articles have been cited but looking at the attention that articles have been getting on the internet so i’m going to start with altmetric here and this is a badge that you can find for articles altmetric is a website that collects this information and it looks to see you know when and where have people been talking about your article that’s been published and it pulls from places like facebook reddit youtube twitter blogs uh different news outlets wikipedia patents, he said that this article kind of you know flew under the radar until coveted hit and they were looking for information on convalescent blood products for covid and this article was picked up by news outlets, i let me go back a slide to this score um all these mentions are weighted so a tweet gets less weight than a news outlet youtube or facebook each each of these companies has a weight assigned to it so yeah news outlets score higher than twitter is basically it and that’s where in the score comes from that type of information so plum x does not provide a score but you can still look to see you know who’s talking about your article and why and if you’re going for promotion and tenure you can say you know my article has been cited and talked about by these people on social media in this way and it’s really had an impact in public health or you know other things so these plum x and altmetric information is freely available to see information about individual specific articles at mcw we don’t have access to the back end so you can’t do kind of a collective sweep of all your articles and get that information in one report so that concludes the article level metrics do you have any questions about that piece okay then the last section i’m going to be talking about are author level metrics so this is looking at one person and their research productivity and actually i forgot to include i added an additional metric in here this morning called the m index that will be talked about after the h index so the h index this was developed in 2005 by george hirsch so the h comes from hirsch and this equals the number of articles that have received at least that number of citations so if i’m looking at this list of publications i’ve got 10 different publications listed my h index would be five because five of these articles have been cited at least five times to bump my h index up to six i would need six citations from some of these articles down below so this number um is the longer that you’ve been publishing and the more information you’ve been publishing the higher your h index is going to be and it takes a while to collect these citations so someone who published an article in 2020 you know getting nine citations that’s pretty fast turn around but if your article is published in 2022 it may take a couple years for those to get cited so h indexes reward researchers who’ve you know continually published and whose papers have been continually cited so the longer you’ve been doing this the higher the h index you’ll have now taking an h index score like this and looking at a department where you’ve got some people in the department who’ve been there for 30 years and then you’ve got people who’ve been hired and just started in their career for two years comparing apples to apples that’s a very unfair thing to do to researchers so you know if you’re looking at a department and you’re looking at h indexes i would highly recommend clustering people either by academic rank or looking at how long they’ve been at mcw um and then comparing and doing some calculations to get a more accurate comparison of h indexes some people might limit citation counts to times the items have been cited in the last five years and this might make it a little more fair so using a shorter time frame rather than all of the articles and all of their citation data since the beginning one way to kind of take into account the differences in career lengths is to use an m index and this is taking the h index but dividing it by the number of years a researcher has been active so in this case if i’ve got my h index of five and it’s been nine years since my first publication i have an h index of 0.55 you could do the same for people who’ve been publishing for two years or 30 years and this might be a more fair level of comparison to those who’ve had shorter research times so moving on from the m index you’ve got a g index that was developed by leo eggy in 2006 and this one’s looking at the largest number the largest number such that the top g articles receive together at least g squared citations.
So what we’re looking at essentially is the number of total citations then taking the square root of that so in this case the same set of articles has a g index of nine instead of uh h index of five and what the g index rewards are these outlying articles at the top that have been highly cited so this um yeah takes into account those high citations by looking at complete and total citations to all of your works and then doing the square root of that i don’t see the g index used very often by people i don’t see it listed on their websites or you know when people ask for information about promotion i usually see each index but not g index this is an interesting number um to have but i’m not sure if you give it to someone if they’ll necessarily know what to do with it the last author level metric i want to share is the i10 index and this was developed by google scholar and it’s the easiest of all to calculate it’s how many items have been cited at least 10 times so in this case my i-10 index oops is three because three articles have been cited at least 10 times if you’ve got a profile in google scholar they’ll provide you with your h-index and your i-10 index so you can track your h index and your citation data across different platforms, i added a picture to it and i was able to look through the publications and just affirmed that they were mine so in web of science i’ve got eight publications listed i can see my h index of three i can see how many times the publications have been cited and something new in web of science are these author beam plots right here so the beam plots kind of show where my site where my articles citations stack up against other items that were published in the same year at the same time these bean plots are pretty new to web of science so i’m still wrapping my head around how they work but this is a new metric that can help you kind of see how your impact compares to others scopus also has automatically generated author profiles and like web of science you can go in and claim your scopus record i noticed in scopus i had two records that i had to merge together so i just sent an email to scopus and they were able to get all my documents listed under one source um here i can see i’ve got 12 documents that are indexed in scopus and i’ve got an h index of three so this information it’s available for anyone in scopus who’s published more than two articles and they’ve been able to kind of automatically generate the author profile if you’d like to claim it and clean it up that’s available to you to do and then finally google scholar has author profiling so you can go into google scholar um here you have to create this so google is not going to automatically generate one for you but you can create your author profile if you tie it to your institutional address email address then you’ll get a verified google scholar profile and here i can find my citations my articles i can clean up my works i can add works that google scholar might have missed and here i could see the number of citations and my h index and my i10 index so all of these profiles lists a different number of publications in a different number of times cited but i’ve got a three in each resource so i think you’ll find that the platforms all have pretty consistent metrics especially in regards to each index when you’re sending information about your h index like with article citations it’s important to say where you pulled it from and the date you pulled it so whether you’re pulling from web of science scopus or google scholar just let the person who’s getting that information know the source of the data and then this here is a chart of some of my some of my articles and then looking at citation counts and web of science scopus and google scholar and the n a’s show that these articles aren’t indexed in certain resources so web of science doesn’t pull in articles from the scopus journal of hospital librarianship and scopus doesn’t pull in articles from arthritis and rheumatology so relying on any one database to get this inaccurate count of all of your citations is challenging because not all databases cover everything so you know you can do a combination of these things you can take citation data from all your sources and kind of merge it together and get your own h index or your own citation counts but um as always it’s it’s it’s good to show how you put that number together so people can replicate it and check to make sure that the numbers match up so even though i’ve got different citation counts for all my articles it still shows h index of three across all the sources so it’s a little early i’m at the end of my presentation there’s 15 minutes left so i’d love to hear any questions or comments about this if you need clarification on anything i provided or you have alternative metrics you might want to share with us or with the group now’s the time i can open it up for that okay thank you for your question carissa i see um are there best metrics to use for each of these levels um so the metrics um you know it depends on who you’re looking at and who you’re evaluating and how you’re evaluating so there’s no one metrics like scopus journal impact factors well known but is that the best metric for your field you know i guess it depends on what everyone else is doing and what the constraints are when you’re looking at author level metrics you know i gave some instances where it’s not necessarily fair to compare an h index of a long-standing researcher to one of a new newer researcher so you’ve got to just be careful when you’re using the metrics you might want to incorporate something like the m index so i don’t think that there’s best metrics for anyone like there’s no single answer for anyone it’s just being aware of what you’re counting how you’re counting and making sure that it’s equitable counting for all the people whose um you know got stake in whatever the metric shows if that makes sense i’ve got some information on my research impact guide that talks about the ethics of using metrics so there’s different groups out there that have published papers about how metrics can be ethically used so dora is one of those places d-o-r-a
I’ve got a session coming up soon about research data management so if you’re at all working with data and files this research data management might be for you it’s got some tips on how to start practicing good data management and also we’ll be talking a little bit about nih’s new requirements for sharing data i’ll also be talking about tracking scholarly input for your department so if you’re collecting uh publications for your department like um in this session i’ll be offering different sources you can use to collect that data and kind of harness it and keep track of it over time and then in june we’ll be talking about open access so i’ve got a panel discussion on june 16th with people who’ve published an open access scopus journal so you can ask questions on you know how they went through it how they got funding what their views are in open access so i hope you’ll join us for more of those series and also please fill out the evaluation link that alex provided here it’s the first in a series of webinars and i just want to make sure that we’re hitting the right points and that we’re being relevant to the mcw community so i will stay on if you’ve got questions or comments about impact please feel free to share okay thank you everybody and have a good uh thursday.
Where to find high quality research articles online?
High-quality research articles are published in a variety of topics, including environmental science, atmospheric science, and earth science, in the peer-reviewed journal Global Research Letters (GRL). Researchers can improve their citation count by being more visible in the scientific community by publishing in GRL. A database that keeps track of citations to scientific papers across a variety of topics is called the Science Citation Index (SCI). A publication’s influence within the scientific community is inversely correlated with the number of citations it receives.
The average number of citations that articles in a certain publication earn over the course of a year is measured by the impact factor. Researchers can enhance the number of citations they receive by publishing in GRL, and this will raise the journal’s impact factor. The prestige of the journal will increase with a higher impact factor, which could result in better recognition for the researchers and their work. The researchers who publish in GRL may ultimately benefit from enhanced funding possibilities and career chances.