Impact factors are a critical to the success of many journals. Simply explained, an impact factor is the yearly mean of citations of a journal over. The number is calculated using data from the previous two years. Every year, Clarivate calculates the new impact factors.
Why do Impact Factors matter?
In the long list of things that can influence your journal’s reputation, an impact factor is near the top of the list. Impact factors are often used as a metric for how important a journal is in any given field. From the perspective of many academics, it can be boiled down to “bigger impact factor number is better than smaller impact factor number.”
Is this true though? Is it as simple as the bigger the impact factor the better the journal?
The truth is that it’s a bit more nuanced than that. It’s true that given the choice, you might want to publish in a journal that has one versus not having one. But that doesn’t mean that a lower number is worse, or even that the journal is not as reputable.
This is a problem with using impact factors as a metric—sometimes people assign too much importance to them. This does happen a lot though. Let’s look at why you might want to not worry about them too much.
They don’t speak to integrity
An impact factor is a number calculated on citations. It does not measure anything else. It also doesn’t measure your journal’s practices, nor does it measure how careful you are being in selecting manuscripts. This value also doesn’t take into account how reputable your editorial board is. Or even what field you’re in. It is the yearly mean of your journal’s citations over prior two years.
That’s it.
There are many different ways that your journal can go above and beyond expectations. You can provide a clear and transparent experience for authors. Maybe your editorial processes are highly organized and your authors will always understand every part of the publishing process. You might even have a highly organized, clear, and easy to understand peer review process. But none of these things are accounted for with impact factors. This means that while getting an impact factor for your journal might be important, it isn’t the only thing that matters.
Over the years, there have been criticisms of impact factors. But criticisms are not necessarily bad. Here, we’re going to talk about some of these criticisms but we’ll also be talking about why impact factors are really important for your journal.
Your editorial processes are critical
As noted above, sometimes metrics don’t take into account a number of other factors. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t unimportant. It also doesn’t mean that these factors aren’t critical to receiving a higher impact factor. While your journal isn’t able to take steps to ensure that citations in your journals happen, there are certain things you can do to try and influence those results.
First of all, because impact factors are based on citations, you want to make sure that your content is cited. How do you do that? Make sure that you are undertaking a thorough peer review process. One of the things that a peer review process should look at is whether or not research is novel and interesting. If it is, this might translate to more citations. This sort of mentality isn’t something that will immediately translate into results though.
It takes time and diligence to make sure you get good results.
When do impact factors not matter?
While Clarivate’s system is very useful to help authors to determine where they might want to submit their journal articles to, that doesn’t mean it’s the best system. For example, it is much more likely that journals that produce content related to the “hard sciences” will receive an impact factor faster than journals that focus on the humanities.
The fields of research and how they operate are very different. The sciences tend to focus on current, up-to-date research. On the other hand, many branches of the humanities look back, making it a bit less likely for any one paper to be cited hundreds of times in a short period of time. Could it happen? Of course. But here we’re just discussing how things tend to work.
Whether or not all of this matters to your journal depends on a lot of factors. One of the best things that you can do for your journal is to decide early on whether or not an impact factor will make a big difference to your goals. If so, plan for it. If they don’t matter, then you can safely ignore the pressure to achieve those targets.
Future discussions about impact factors
As with most things, there is a lot of nuance when it comes to these sorts of things, so in the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing some more content about impact factors and how they might (or might not) affect your journal.