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Journal Citation Reports will include Early Access content in the calculation of the Journal Impact Factors in June 2021

by Claudia Lascar on 2021-02-17T09:15:00-05:00 in General / Multidisciplinary | 0 Comments

 

Clarivate, the metrics company that publishes Journal Citation Reports (JCR), has announced on November 24, 2020 that the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) scores will be based on data from online publications (when it is available to them) rather than from print publications as previously done. There was no Early Access contribution to the 2020 JIF denominator, since the denominator only included citable items with a final publication date of 2018 and 2019 for print sources.

Clarivate defines EA content as "the public availability of a Version of Record in advance of the assignment of that article to a volume, issue, and page” (1). This change occurred in response to the increase in electronic publishing and the introduction of early access articles such as: Articles in Press, Published Ahead of Print, Online First, etc. (ibid). For example, the First Release Science Papers (from journal Science) are selected based on the timeliness and importance of the research and posted two weeks ahead of the online version and 6 weeks ahead of the print version.

According to Steve Hubbard, Team Lead at JCR, this transition to EA publication data will be gradual since only half of the journals indexed in Web of Science (WoS) have EA content, although this process began to be implemented in 2017. Many publishers including Elsevier decided not to make the data available to WoS (ibid).   

According to Phil Davis, who wrote two in-depth posts for the Scholarly Kitchen, there is bias with this model against print publications, journals with high levels of self-citation, and those journals with long lag times between online issues etc. There is a real-time lag between the online version of a publication versus its print counterpart, or between print publications and online only publications. He suggests that this change does not have sufficient transparency to help him decide its outcome. I recommend these articles for those interested in learning more about publishing and impact factors. 

Some changes in the scores will occur, but it is doubtful that the higher-tier journals will change their place dramatically. One thing that is clear is that open access journals in WoS will benefit from this change.

  1. Hubbard, S. (2020, 11, 24). What’s next for JCR: defining ‘Early Access.' Blog/ Article.

        https://clarivate.com/webofsciencegroup/article/whats-next-for-jcr-defining-early-access/

  1.  Ibid.
  2. Davis, P. (2020, 12, 7). Changes to Journal Impact Factor Announced for 2021. The Scholarly Kitchen.

        https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2020/12/07/jif-calculation-2021/

  1. Davis, P. (2021, 2, 1) Changing Journal Impact Factor Rules Creates Unfair Playing Field For Some. The Scholarly Kitchen.

        https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/02/01/unfair-playing-field/

 

 


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