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unusual impact. Therefore, the key determinants in impact are not the number of authors or articles in
the field but, rather, the mean number of citations per article (density) and the half-life or immediacy
of citations to a given journal. The time required to review manuscripts may also affect impact. If
reviewing and publication are delayed, references to articles that are no longer current may not be
included in the impact calculation. Even the appearance of articles on the same subject in the same
issue of a journal may have an effect.

For greater precision, it is preferable to conduct item-by-item journal audits so that any differences
in impact for these different types of editorial items can be taken into account. For a small number of
journals a bias may be introduced by including in the numerator these extra citations to items that are
not part of the denominator of source articles. Clearly, if the denominator is smaller than the actual
number of published items, it will increase the journal’s impact factor. This in turn may alter the
rankings. However, most journals primarily publish substantive research or review articles. Therefore,
statistical discrepancies are rare. The JCR data (Journal Citation Report data) have come under some
criticism for this reason among others.
Different metrics for determination of Impact factor of a journal has been represented in Figure 1.
Although IF has its constraints, until there are better proposed alternative methods, it remains one
of the most effective methods for assessing scholarly activity. Main points of consideration regarding
methodological aspects in the calculation of this index include the lack of assessment of the quality
of citations, the inclusion of self-citations, the poor comparability between different scientific fields,
and the analysis of mainly English-language publications. In fact, many researchers have proposed
different approaches in the evaluation of the quality of scientific journals. The common point in most
of these approaches is the assessment of the quality of citations received by a journal. The quality of
citations can be estimated analysing the networks of scientific papers with sophisticated mathematical
algorithms.

Figure 1. Impact Factor as per Citation Report and Metrics

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