The Journal Impact Factor Denominator

Impact factors, citation distributions and journal stratification

“…Although the classification protocol has been defined [2], there is still a lot of grey area [3], 1 particularly in publications that fall somewhere between scientific journals and society membership magazines. 2 In 2013 and 2014, the Journal of Materials Science published 1818 items, comprising 1768 articles (97.2 % of content), 44 reviews (2.4 %), 5 editorials and 1 correction.…”

“…3 About 70 % of articles published in 2013 and 2014 in the Journal of Materials Science were cited fewer times than the value of the 2015 JIF. Table 1 shows that this is consistent with three other materials science journals, regardless of JIF.…”

Back to the Beginning — The Journal is Dead, Long Live Science

“…All the same, everyone is not a researcher, and it is, therefore, not needful for everyone to write a research paper -not everyone, therefore, is a citer (Garfield, 1999(Garfield, , 2006Hubbard & McVeigh, 2011;McVeigh & Mann, 2009;Priem & Hemminger, 2010). Lawyers maintain records of past judgments and court proceedings for the purpose of informing their positions on matters of the law.…”

Are we happy with the impact factor?

“…There is ongoing debate on what exactly should go into the formula (McVeigh & Mann, 2009). Both in the numerator and denominator, only journals that are included in WoS are considered—all other sources are disregarded.…”