Submission and Citation-Based Study on Temporal Variation of Journal Impact Factor

The most significant indicator in the Science Citation Index (SCI) is the Impact Factor, a numerical instrument for analysing the ranks and grades of various scientific publications in the Journal Citation Report (JCR) database. In specific ways, the impact factor has been regarded as the most widely used metric for assessing the quality of journals. The main goal of this work is to develop a distributed parallel model for investigating the fluctuation of journal impact factors. Our model attempts to model and recreate the behaviours of article submission and paper citation behaviours using social computing methodologies and understanding the reason for specific events, such as the relationship between Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and the academic quality of journals, using simulation experiment data. The simulation results show that JIF influences and drives submission and citation behaviours and that the academic quality of journals is correlated with JIF levels.

The frequency with which a journal is referenced can be used to determine its academic impact. Researchers in most nations attempted to utilise SCI to evaluate the quality of scientific work in the mid-1980s, collecting and recording a vast amount of scientific citation data. The impact factor is one of the essential metrics in SCI research, and it has piqued the interest of many academics. In JCR, the impact factor influences how academic journals are ranked (Journal Citation Report). Impact variables are used by the majority of scientific research institutes and universities to assess the assessment and performance of researchers. Some journal publishers track their sales using impact factors, with higher impact factor values attracting more high-quality papers and readers. Furthermore, while the impact factor’s initial aim was to evaluate the quality and influence of academic journals as an academic quantitative indicator, it is increasingly being used in the field of scientific econometrics and other domains.

References

L. Liu, J. Zhou, C. Diao and N. Cai, “Joint Behaviors of Submission and Citation-Based Study on Temporal Variation of Journal Impact Factor,” 2021 33rd Chinese Control and Decision Conference (CCDC), 2021, pp. 2520-2525, doi: 10.1109/CCDC52312.2021.9601872.