How a Single Paper Affects the Impact Factor: Implications for Scholarly Publishing

Published: Jun 6, 2019
Abstract
Because the Impact Factor (IF) is an average quantity and most journals are small, IFs are volatile. We study how a single paper affects the IF using data from 11639 journals in the 2017 Journal Citation Reports. We define as volatility the IF gain (or loss) caused by a single paper, and this is inversely proportional to journal size. We find high volatilities for hundreds of journals annually due to their top-cited paper: whether it is a...
Paper Details
Title
How a Single Paper Affects the Impact Factor: Implications for Scholarly Publishing
Published Date
Jun 6, 2019
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