Rocky Balboa, Philadelphia, PA. Creative Commons licensed picture by seng1011 (steve eng) on Flickr.
[This post is part of an ongoing series about impact factors]
In the world of abused performance metrics, the impact factor is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the (publishing) world.
It has been an eventful year in the boxing ring of scientific publishing since the last set of figures were published by Thomson-Reuters. A brand new journal called PeerJ launched with a radical publish ’til you perish business model [1]. There’s another new journal on the way too in the shape of eLifeSciences – with it’s own significant differences from current publishing models. Then there was the Finch report on Open Access. If that wasn’t enough fun, there’s been the Alternative metrics “Altmetrics” movement gathering pace [2], alongside suggestions that the impact factor may be losing its grip on the supposed “title” [3].
The impact factors below are the most recent, published June 28th 2012, covering data from 2011. Love them or loathe them, use them or abuse them, game them or shame them … here is a tiny selection of impact factors for the 10,675 journals that are tracked in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) ordered by increasing punch power.
WARNING: Abusing these figures can seriously damage your Science – you have been warned! Normal caveats apply, see nature.com/metrics.
| Journal | 2011 data from isiknowledge.com/JCR | Eigenfactor™ Metrics | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Cites | Impact Factor | 5-Year Impact Factor | Immediacy Index | Articles | Cited Half-life | Eigenfactor™ Score | Article Influence™ Score | |
| Russian Journal of Cardiology* | 3 | 0.005 | 0.000 | 75 | 0.00000 | |||
| BMC Bioinformatics | 14268 | 2.751 | 3.493 | 0.293 | 557 | 4.2 | 0.07757 | 1.314 |
| PLoS ONE | 75544 | 4.092 | 4.537 | 0.437 | 13781 | 2.4 | 0.50216 | 1.797 |
| Briefings in Bioinformatics | 2859 | 5.202 | 7.749 | 0.692 | 65 | 4.3 | 0.01129 | 2.857 |
| PLoS Computational Biology | 8924 | 5.215 | 5.844 | 0.710 | 407 | 3.1 | 0.06968 | 2.722 |
| OUP Bioinformatics | 43380 | 5.468 | 6.051 | 0.666 | 707 | 6.2 | 0.15922 | 2.606 |
| Nucleic Acids Research | 106520 | 8.026 | 7.417 | 2.016 | 1230 | 7.4 | 0.30497 | 3.003 |
| Genome Biology | 15556 | 9.036 | 7.896 | 1.550 | 151 | 5.2 | 0.08221 | 4.124 |
| PLoS Biology | 20579 | 11.452 | 13.630 | 2.461 | 180 | 4.6 | 0.14975 | 7.830 |
| Science | 480836 | 31.201 | 32.452 | 6.075 | 871 | 9.4 | 1.41282 | 17.508 |
| Nature | 526505 | 36.280 | 36.235 | 9.690 | 841 | 9.4 | 1.65658 | 20.353 |
| New England Journal of Medicine | 232068 | 53.298 | 50.075 | 11.484 | 349 | 7.8 | 0.66466 | 21.293 |
| CA – A Cancer Journal for Clinicians** | 10976 | 101.780 | 67.410 | 21.263 | 19 | 3.8 | 0.04502 | 24.502 |
* The Russian Journal of Cardiology is included here for reference as it has the lowest non-zero impact factor of any science journal. A rather dubious honour…
** The Cancer Journal for Clinicians is the highest ranked journal in science, it is included here for reference. Could it be the first journal to have an impact factor of more than 100?
References
- Richard Van Noorden (2012). Journal offers flat fee for ‘all you can publish’, Nature, 486 (7402) 166. DOI: 10.1038/486166a
- Jason Priem, Heather Piwowar and Bradley Hemminger (2012). Altmetrics in the wild: Using social media to explore scholarly impact arxiv.org/abs/1203.4745
- George Lozano, Vincent Lariviere and Yves Gingras (2012). The weakening relationship between the Impact Factor and papers’ citations in the digital age arxiv.org/abs/1205.4328
O'Really? 