To those outside the world of research and academia, a journal is a journal and any article published in one is worthy of admiration and respect. In many ways, journals are like universities: they uphold “reputations,” differences in reliability and quality that can be quantified with rankings. Just as students agonize over the ranking of the university they choose to attend, any research student or professor must carefully consider the ranking of the journals they read or submit work to. In fact, the complex ranking system in place, where journals are assigned “impact factors,” is shocking in magnitude and important to any student who hopes to write a powerful paper.
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So what is an impact factor? Who determines it? How is it calculated? Thomson Reuters is one of the most common and reliable sources for impact factor information. Each year, from 1997 to the present, Reuters analyzes 10,100 journals from over 2,600 publishers in approximately 238 disciplines and compiles data into two Journal Citation Report (JCR) editions — the Sciences Edition and the Social Sciences Edition. Three scores are calculated: an impact factor, an eigenfactor score, and an article influence score.
Impact factors are the most popular means of systematically and objectively evaluating journals. Averaging the number of times articles from a journal published within the past two years have been cited within the year of the report, the compilation of the JCR produces a value on a scale where low values indicate a low impact in the academic community and high values indicate a high impact.
To the average student, impact factors are a useful tool. The greater the impact factor, the more reliable and accurate the source of the information. In fact, the screening process for articles tends to be much more rigorous for high-impact journals, a natural result of the intense competition to publish in them. For this reason, confidence in the methods and materials of labs which have published in a high-impact journal tends to be much greater, and results are strongly supported.
For the average journal reader, accuracy isn’t the ultimate benefit. A high score suggests that the articles published in the journal are novel and revolutionary, a fact that media outlets often capitalize on. Whether in social sciences or engineering, impact factor is the equivalent of prestige. In fact, to a professor or research student, scoring a spot in a journal with a high impact factor can mean media attention, an excellent chance of obtaining grant money, a teaching position at a university, or the opportunity to gain exposure for a new idea.
Writing a paper that has an impact requires research with an impact. Familiarizing yourself with impact factors can have a striking difference on the reliability of the research you complete. Whether or not you write, picking up a copy of Nature might just give you a heads-up on the next big science phenomenon.
