The impact factor is just one quantitative factor to use in evaluating or comparing a journal's relative importance to others in the same field. It identifies the frequency with which an average article from a journal is cited in a particular year.
The 2010 impact factor for Journal X would be calculated by dividing the number of 2010 citations to articles appearing in Journal X during 2008-2009 by the number of articles published in Journal X in 2008-2009.
See the Thomson Reuters website for more information.
The established source for journal rankings (including impact factors) is the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database.
In addition to Impact Factors, you can also find the following metrics in JCR: Total number of cites to a journal in a given year, 5-year Impact Factor, Immediacy Index, the total number of articles in the journal published in a given year, Cited Half-Life, Eigenfactor Score, and Article Influence Score.
Please refer to the Definitions/Terminology tab above to learn more about these metrics.
Scientific Writing for Factor Journals by
Publish or Perish. This old adage illustrates the importance of scientific communication; essential to research, it also represents a strategic sector for each country's competitiveness. An often-neglected topic, scientific communication is of vital importance, with new information technologies accelerating and profoundly changing how knowledge is disseminated. The necessity of optimally disseminating experts' findings has also become crucial to researchers, institutes and universities alike, which has prompted the recent advent of Impact Factors for the evaluation and financing of research, the goal being for scientific knowledge to be equally distributed to a very broad audience, especially to the media, entrepreneurs and socio-political players. This handbook presents the "golden rules" for publishing scientific articles. In order to do away with major recurring errors, the author explains how to easily structure an article and offers support for the typical mistakes made by native French speakers publishing in English, tips on how to make the style more academic of more general to fit your intended readership and, in the book's closing section, suggests new publishing techniques of the Internet age such as the micro-article, which allows researchers to focus their findings into a single innovative point. The major principles presented can be applied to a broad range of documents such as theses, industry reports, publicity texts, letters of intent, CVs/resumes, blogs and press releases, as all of these documents involve presenting information on advances, discoveries, innovations, or changes to our previous knowledge.