Impact Factor and CiteScore

Guest Author – Azizul Haque
Assistant Professor, Yeungnam University.

To understand the quality, acceptance, and impact of academic journals, researchers, educational institutions, and readers generally rely on certain specific indicators. The two most discussed and important among these are the Impact Factor and CiteScore. These metrics indicate how many times the research articles published in a particular journal within a specific period have been cited in other research. In other words, these metrics not only reflect the relevance and acceptance of research papers, but also play a supportive role in determining a journal’s academic standing and quality.

Impact Factor

The Impact Factor is a type of measurement used to determine the quality and significance of scientific and academic journals. This concept was first introduced in the 1960s by Dr. Eugene Garfield. With the goal of creating a reliable method to measure the impact of research and the scientific value of journals, he established the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which later became known as Clarivate. Today, the Impact Factor is published through the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) by Clarivate Analytics, and is considered one of the main indicators of a scientific journal’s quality.

The Impact Factor of a journal is determined by calculating the ratio of the total number of citations received by research papers published in that journal over the past two years to the total number of research papers published in the same period. In this calculation, only research articles and review articles are considered.

For example, let’s say the total number of citations for all research papers published in a journal in 2023 and 2024 is 850, and the total number of research papers published over those two years is 115.

So, Impact Factor = (Total number of citations for research papers published in 2023 and 2024) / (Total number of research papers published in 2023 and 2024)

Total number of research papers

= 850/115 = 7.39

That is, the Impact Factor of that journal is 7.39.

CiteScore

Compared to the Impact Factor, CiteScore is a relatively new and modern arithmetic metric, introduced by Elsevier in 2016. Its main purpose was to develop a new standard that could measure the long-term impact of research in a broader and more transparent way. This index is calculated based on data from Elsevier’s Scopus database. CiteScore considers a wider range of documents than Impact Factor, including research articles, review articles, conference papers, book chapters, data papers, and more.

CiteScore is determined primarily by the ratio of the total number of citations received by articles published in a journal over the past three years to the total number of articles published during that period. For example, if the total number of citations for papers published in 2022, 2023, and 2024 in a journal is 1,070 and the total number of papers published in those three years is 155, then the CiteScore will be:

CiteScore = 1,070 / 155 = 6.90

In other words, that journal’s CiteScore is 6.90.

Note: Collected from Facebook.