Abstract
One disadvantage of the JCR impact factor, the most commonly used assessment tool for ranking and evaluating scientific journals, is its inability in distinguishing among different shapes of citation distribution curves, leading to unfair evaluation of journals in some cases. This paper aims to put forward an alternative impact factor (IF′) that can properly reflect citation distributions. The two impact factors are linearly and positively correlated, and have roughly the same order of magnitude. Because of the ability of IF′ in distinguishing among different shapes of citation distribution curves, IF′ may properly reflect the academic performance of a scientific journal in a way that is different from the JCR impact factor with some unique features that reward journals with highly cited papers. Therefore, it is suggested that IF′ could be used to complement the JCR impact factor.
Highlights
The concept of the impact factor was proposed by Garfield[1] about 60 years ago
The area under the citation distribution curve is divided by the h-index into three parts, representing the h2, the excess citations (e2) and h-tail citations (t2), respectively
The journal Current Biology is ranked No 8 in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR)-rankings, whereas it is ranked No 40 in the rankings based on IF9
Summary
The concept of the impact factor was proposed by Garfield[1] about 60 years ago. Since the impact factor has become the most commonly used assessment tool for ranking and evaluating scientific journals. A number of researchers explored the possibility of using the h-index to complement or correct the traditional impact factor. Relationship between the h-index and impact factor in the power-law model was studied by Egghe, Liang, & Rousseau[17] Despite these beneficial exploring researches, the h-index suffers from a number of inherent shortcomings. Ignoring the contributions from the excess and h-tail citations usually either under-estimates or over-estimates the academic performance of the scientist or the journal under study. To solve this problem, recently a new h-type index was proposed, called the h9-index[21]. The proposal of the h9-index inspired us to explore the possibility of using the h9-index to complement and correct the traditional impact factor, and this is the aim of the present paper
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