IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/scient/v92y2012i2d10.1007_s11192-012-0689-6.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Comments on a critique of the Thomson Reuters journal impact factor

Author

Listed:
  • David A. Pendlebury

    (Thomson Reuters)

  • Jonathan Adams

    (Thomson Reuters)

Abstract

We discuss research evaluation, the nature of impact, and the use of the Thomson Reuters journal impact factor and other indicators in scientometrics in the light of recent commentary.

Suggested Citation

  • David A. Pendlebury & Jonathan Adams, 2012. "Comments on a critique of the Thomson Reuters journal impact factor," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 92(2), pages 395-401, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:92:y:2012:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-012-0689-6
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-012-0689-6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-012-0689-6
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11192-012-0689-6?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Stephen J. Bensman, 2012. "The impact factor: its place in Garfield’s thought, in science evaluation, and in library collection management," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 92(2), pages 263-275, August.
    2. Ronald Rousseau, 2012. "Updating the journal impact factor or total overhaul?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 92(2), pages 413-417, August.
    3. Loet Leydesdorff, 2012. "Alternatives to the journal impact factor: I3 and the top-10% (or top-25%?) of the most-highly cited papers," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 92(2), pages 355-365, August.
    4. Juan Miguel Campanario & Jesús Carretero & Vera Marangon & Antonio Molina & Germán Ros, 2011. "Effect on the journal impact factor of the number and document type of citing records: a wide-scale study," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 87(1), pages 75-84, April.
    5. Loet Leydesdorff & Lutz Bornmann, 2011. "Integrated impact indicators compared with impact factors: An alternative research design with policy implications," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 62(11), pages 2133-2146, November.
    6. Jonathan Adams, 2005. "Early citation counts correlate with accumulated impact," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 63(3), pages 567-581, June.
    7. Werner Marx, 2011. "Special features of historical papers from the viewpoint of bibliometrics," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 62(3), pages 433-439, March.
    8. Jonathan Adams & Karen Gurney & Stuart Marshall, 2007. "Profiling citation impact: A new methodology," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 72(2), pages 325-344, August.
    9. E. Garfield & I. H. Sher, 1963. "New factors in the evaluation of scientific literature through citation indexing," American Documentation, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 14(3), pages 195-201, July.
    10. Werner Marx, 2011. "Special features of historical papers from the viewpoint of bibliometrics," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 62(3), pages 433-439, March.
    11. Anthony F. J. van Raan, 2005. "Fatal attraction: Conceptual and methodological problems in the ranking of universities by bibliometric methods," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 62(1), pages 133-143, January.
    12. David Adam, 2002. "The counting house," Nature, Nature, vol. 415(6873), pages 726-729, February.
    13. Jerome K. Vanclay, 2012. "Impact factor: outdated artefact or stepping-stone to journal certification?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 92(2), pages 211-238, August.
    14. Juan Miguel Campanario, 2011. "Empirical study of journal impact factors obtained using the classical two-year citation window versus a five-year citation window," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 87(1), pages 189-204, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kai Petersen & Nauman Bin Ali, 2021. "An analysis of top author citations in software engineering and a comparison with other fields," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(11), pages 9147-9183, November.
    2. Raf Vanderstraeten & Frédéric Vandermoere, 2021. "Inequalities in the growth of Web of Science," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(10), pages 8635-8651, October.
    3. Stuart Brody, 2013. "Impact factor: Imperfect but not yet replaceable," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 96(1), pages 255-257, July.
    4. Katja Rost & Thorsten Teichert & Alan Pilkington, 2017. "Social network analytics for advanced bibliometrics: referring to actor roles of management journals instead of journal rankings," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 112(3), pages 1631-1657, September.
    5. Gangan Prathap, 2014. "Single parameter indices and bibliometric outliers," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(3), pages 1781-1787, December.
    6. Gangan Prathap, 2013. "Second order indicators for evaluating international scientific collaboration," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 95(2), pages 563-570, May.
    7. Gangan Prathap, 2012. "Evaluating journal performance metrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 92(2), pages 403-408, August.
    8. Loet Leydesdorff & Lutz Bornmann & Jonathan Adams, 2019. "The integrated impact indicator revisited (I3*): a non-parametric alternative to the journal impact factor," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(3), pages 1669-1694, June.
    9. Peter Jacso, 2012. "Grim tales about the impact factor and the h-index in the Web of Science and the Journal Citation Reports databases: reflections on Vanclay’s criticism," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 92(2), pages 325-354, August.
    10. Gangan Prathap, 2017. "A three-dimensional bibliometric evaluation of recent research in India," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 110(3), pages 1085-1097, March.
    11. Finardi, Ugo, 2013. "Correlation between Journal Impact Factor and Citation Performance: An experimental study," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(2), pages 357-370.
    12. Gangan Prathap, 2014. "A three-dimensional bibliometric evaluation of research in polymer solar cells," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(1), pages 889-898, October.
    13. Matteo Migheli & Giovanni B. Ramello, 2021. "The unbearable lightness of scientometric indices," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 42(8), pages 1933-1944, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Mingers, John & Leydesdorff, Loet, 2015. "A review of theory and practice in scientometrics," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 246(1), pages 1-19.
    2. Mingers, John & Yang, Liying, 2017. "Evaluating journal quality: A review of journal citation indicators and ranking in business and management," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 257(1), pages 323-337.
    3. Waltman, Ludo, 2016. "A review of the literature on citation impact indicators," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 365-391.
    4. Zhou, Ping & Zhong, Yongfeng, 2012. "The citation-based indicator and combined impact indicator—New options for measuring impact," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 6(4), pages 631-638.
    5. Lando, Tommaso & Bertoli-Barsotti, Lucio, 2017. "Measuring the citation impact of journals with generalized Lorenz curves," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 11(3), pages 689-703.
    6. Kun Lu & Isola Ajiferuke & Dietmar Wolfram, 2014. "Extending citer analysis to journal impact evaluation," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 100(1), pages 245-260, July.
    7. Leydesdorff, Loet & Bornmann, Lutz & Marx, Werner & Milojević, Staša, 2014. "Referenced Publication Years Spectroscopy applied to iMetrics: Scientometrics, Journal of Informetrics, and a relevant subset of JASIST," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 8(1), pages 162-174.
    8. Brito, Ricardo & Rodríguez-Navarro, Alonso, 2018. "Research assessment by percentile-based double rank analysis," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 315-329.
    9. Fang Xu & Wenbin Liu & Ronald Rousseau, 2015. "Introducing sub-impact factor (SIF-) sequences and an aggregated SIF-indicator for journal ranking," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 102(2), pages 1577-1593, February.
    10. Loet Leydesdorff & Paul Wouters & Lutz Bornmann, 2016. "Professional and citizen bibliometrics: complementarities and ambivalences in the development and use of indicators—a state-of-the-art report," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(3), pages 2129-2150, December.
    11. Daniela Filippo & Rafael Aleixandre-Benavent & Elías Sanz-Casado, 2020. "Toward a classification of Spanish scholarly journals in social sciences and humanities considering their impact and visibility," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(2), pages 1709-1732, November.
    12. Finardi, Ugo, 2013. "Correlation between Journal Impact Factor and Citation Performance: An experimental study," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(2), pages 357-370.
    13. Rabishankar Giri & Sabuj Kumar Chaudhuri, 2021. "Ranking journals through the lens of active visibility," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(3), pages 2189-2208, March.
    14. Vinkler, Péter, 2014. "The use of the Percentage Rank Position index for comparative evaluation of journals," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 8(2), pages 340-348.
    15. David I Stern, 2014. "High-Ranked Social Science Journal Articles Can Be Identified from Early Citation Information," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(11), pages 1-11, November.
    16. Tian Yu & Guang Yu & Peng-Yu Li & Liang Wang, 2014. "Citation impact prediction for scientific papers using stepwise regression analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 101(2), pages 1233-1252, November.
    17. Albarrán, Pedro & Herrero, Carmen & Ruiz-Castillo, Javier & Villar, Antonio, 2017. "The Herrero-Villar approach to citation impact," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 11(2), pages 625-640.
    18. Wolfgang Glänzel & Henk F. Moed, 2013. "Opinion paper: thoughts and facts on bibliometric indicators," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 96(1), pages 381-394, July.
    19. Matthieu Ballandonne & Igor Cersosimo, 2021. "A note on reference publication year spectroscopy with incomplete information," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(6), pages 4927-4939, June.
    20. David L. Anderson & John Tressler, 2016. "Citation-Capture Rates for Economics Journals: Do they Differ from Other Disciplines and Does it Matter?," Economic Papers, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 35(1), pages 73-85, March.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:92:y:2012:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-012-0689-6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.