The importance of high-quality articles in increasing the journal impact

Abstract

Journal ranking is a widely used tool in universities to evaluate the academic journal's impact and quality. Journal rankings should indicate the journal place within its field and reflect its prestige. These rankings are used as official research evaluation tools in numerous countries. The performance of a scientific journal can be evaluated with its impact factor, a metric introduced by E. Garfield in 1972, which is calculated yearly starting from 1975 for journals listed in Journal Citation Reports by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), now owned by Clarivate Analytics. The impact factor is found as the number of citations received by the journal in a year by the articles published in the last two years, counted in ISI, divided by the number of the journal’s articles published in these two years. Nowadays, there are many organizations calculating the impact factor in various ways, but the relevant impact factor remains that determined by ISI. To achieve a high impact factor and in consequence a good ranking, journals publish mainly original papers and reviews. Regarding case reports, only the exceptional one are published, in order to get the denominator for calculating the impact factor as small as possible. Obviously, publishing high quality articles is the best way to increase the journal’s impact factor. Many researchers are nowadays evaluated by the quality of their publications and the number of citations received by these publications. Wide exposure of the research articles and reaching the largest possible addressees is the key factor to increase citations of the article. Therefore, the open access articles are advantaged compared with those requiring subscription. In the past, numerous scientific publications took measures to increase their impact factors. These measures can sometimes appeal to the use of dubious means, such as self-citations or convincing the authors to cite the journal, selective publication of highly cited authors etc. The Romanian Journal of Acoustics and Vibration discourage such measures to increase citation and impact factor of the journal. The editorial team thanks all authors for submitting articles of high quality to our journal and for their contributions in improving the quality of the journal. The Romanian Journal of Acoustics and Vibration offer to all authors open access publication of their articles without asking for publication fees. Thus, the high quality original articles and reviews submitted by the authors will get an increased number of citations and help the journal achieving even higher standards.