{"id":6013,"date":"2019-08-23T10:03:16","date_gmt":"2019-08-23T10:03:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thepublicationplan.com\/?p=6013"},"modified":"2019-08-23T10:03:16","modified_gmt":"2019-08-23T10:03:16","slug":"how-much-can-a-single-paper-affect-journal-impact-factor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thepublicationplan.com\/2019\/08\/23\/how-much-can-a-single-paper-affect-journal-impact-factor\/","title":{"rendered":"How much can a single paper affect journal impact factor?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"RollerThe journal impact factor (IF) has been the topic of much debate<\/a>, with many calling for it to be replaced by alternative measures<\/a>. In a preprint<\/a> recently published on arXiv<\/a>, Manolis Antonoyiannakis questions the use of the IF as a method of ranking journals and reveals just how much this metric can be altered by a single highly-cited paper.<\/p>\n

Antonoyiannakis analysed data from 11,639 journals that received an IF in the 2017 Journal Citation Reports<\/a>, calculating how much the top-cited paper affected the citation average. IF volatility (the gain or loss of IF due to a single paper) was compared to the journal size (the number of citable papers published in 2015\u201316).<\/p>\n

Strikingly, IFs were much more volatile for smaller versus larger journals; this was particularly apparent in those journals publishing fewer than 250 papers each year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Antonoyiannakis notes that compared with large journals, small publications have much more to gain, in terms of IF, by including highly-cited papers \u2013 and stand to lose far more with low-cited articles. Antonoyiannakis speculates that perhaps this is a strong incentive for small journals with high IFs to remain small.<\/p>\n

Other key findings were that:<\/p>\n