Modifying the journal impact factor by fractional citation weighting: The audience factor

Abstract

A new approach to the field normalization of the classical journal impact factor is introduced. This approach, called the audience factor, takes into consideration the citing propensity of journals for a given cited journal, specifically, the mean number of references of each citing journal, and fractionally weights the citations from those citing journals. Hence, the audience factor is a variant of a fractional citation-counting scheme, but computed on the citing journal rather than the citing article or disciplinary level, and, in contrast to other cited-side normalization strategies, is focused on the behavior of the citing entities. A comparison with standard journal impact factors from Thomson Reuters shows a more diverse representation of fields within various quintiles of impact, significant movement in rankings for a number of individual journals, but nevertheless a high overall correlation with standard impact factors.

Modified Impact Factors

“…37 Fractional counting of citations defined the significance of differences among small and large sets of citing sources. The audience factor was proposed 38 as a variant of a fractional citation-counting scheme. Audience factor is a weighted impact factor, addressing field-discrepancies by citing-side normalization, in contrast both with post-facto field-normalization and influence measures.…”

Peculiarities of publication activity in humanities and social sciences: analysis and prospects

“…These differences are a consequence of citation cultures, and can lead to significant differences in the journal impact factor across fields of science since the probability of being cited is affected. In this sense, this is the factor that the most frequently has been used in literature to justify the differences between fields of science, as well as the most employed in source-normalization [6,7,8].…”

“…Out of more than 700 references in this issue, only 20 referred to publications in 2005 and a mere 7 to publications in 2006 (i.e. less than 4% of the total number of citations) [8].…”

Evaluating research institutions: the potential of the success-index

“…This is probably the most difficult operation, since it represents a still open problem in bibliometrics. Some approaches are ''classification dependent'', as they are based on superimposed classifications, such as ISI subject categories (Waltman et al 2011); others are ''adaptive'', since the sample is determined considering the ''neighbourhood'' of the publication(s) of interestgenerally consisting of the set of publications that cite or are cited by them (Zitt and Small 2008;Leydesdorff and Opthof 2010;Moed 2010a;Zitt 2010;Glänzel et al 2011). 2.…”