How Reliable Are Impact Factors for Ranking Water Resources Journals? An Analysis of the 70,878 Citation Records of the 2002 and 2021 Top 10 Journals for the Last Two Decades

Abstract

For a variety of reasons, which include confirmations and promotions of researchers, and grant funding, journal Impact Factors (IFs) remain widely used. Not surprisingly, a number of disciplines have begun to study the evolutions and trends of these metrics, to the point of van Leeuwen and Wouters (2017) noticing that this has become a research field of its own. For example, Van Hooydonk et al. (1994) investigated the link between library management and journal IFs, and concluded that libraries tend to locally hold journals with a high IF. Interestingly, a very large part of the research on IFs is situated in the medical sciences. Bienert et al. (2015) compared cardiology journals performance indices in different databases, and predicted the use of new and constantly improved quality indicators in the future. Ugolini et al. (2013) showed an increase in the publication numbers and consequent decrease in IF values in literature on cerebrovascular and cardiovascular diseases rehabilitation. In the dermatology discipline, Reiter et al. (2016) investigated the importance of author self-citations in the IF. They concluded that in general the importance was low, except for journals with a relatively low IF. Sims et al. (2003) analyzed trends in the IFs for journals in ophthalmology and vision science. Bador and Lafouge (2010) compared the h-index and the IF of journals in pharmacology and pychiatry, and concluded that these indices are highly complementary. A similar analysis was performed by Bird (2008) for toxicology journals. Also in pharmacology, Amiri and Michel (2018) concluded that review papers do not increase the IF unless they account for more than 10% of all published articles. In the field of ergonomics, Smith (2010) documented a rising trend in the IFs between 200% and 613% from 1975 to 2007. For journals focusing on Orthopedics, Erivan et al. (2020) concluded that publishing papers on case reports lowers the journal IF, because of their low citation rates. For the clinical sciences in general, Royle et al. (2013) showed that the journal IF accounts for 50% of the variations to