impact factor

2013-12-01

azim58 - impact factor


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The impact factor (IF) of an academic journal is a measure reflecting the
average number of citations to recent articles published in the journal.
It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal
within its field, with journals with higher impact factors deemed to be
more important than those with lower ones. The impact factor was devised
by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific
Information. Impact factors are calculated yearly for those journals that
are indexed in the Journal Citation Reports.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor


What is a good impact factor?
http://libanswers.mdanderson.org/a.php?qid=67547
Only about 20% of journals have an impact factor higher than 3. The very
top journals like Nature and Science have impact factors around 30-40.