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Permalink Reply by Mrs.K Kavita Rao on February 27, 2011 at 21:40

Definition

• Seeks to measure the influence a journal has in its field.
• Uses "bibliometric analysis" of journals indexed in the ISI database. More specifically, it measures how often scholars and researchers have cited articles in a particular journal in the most recent two years.
• Simply put, the higher the number, the better the journal's impact factor. The better the journal's impact factor, the more influence it is supposed to have in its field.

Formula for calculation

Numerator: Number of cites in the current year to anything in that journal in the past two years.
Denominator: Number of "citable" articles published in the past two years.

History

• Impact factor was first proposed by Eugene Garfield (who is a chemist, librarian, and linguist by training) in a 1955 article in the journal Science.
• Garfield saw impact factor as a way to "eliminate the uncritical citation of fraudulent, incomplete, or obsolete data by making it possible for the conscientious scholar to be aware of criticisms of earlier papers."
• For Garfield's reflections on the impact factor over fifty years after its invention, see his article in JAMA entitled, "History and Meaning of the Journal Impact Factor".

for more information visit the following site and go through the details:

                     http://ebling.library.wisc.edu/portals/impact-factor/

Also refer:

http://www.research-information.de/iq/agora/Journal_Impact_Factor/j...

http://www.utoledo.edu/library/mulford/pdf/impactfactor.pdf

http://www.iva.dk/bh/core%20concepts%20in%20lis/articles%20a-z/impa...

 

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