scientific reports impact factor 5 years

5-Year Journal Impact Factor

The average number of times articles from the journal published in the past 5 years have been cited in the JCR year.

When to Use It

• Broad View - The 5-Year Journal Impact Factor provides a broader view onto the citation data, but at the expense of granularity (which is reduced).

Limitations and Cautions

The typical lag after publication of a paper until peak citation is variable (across papers, across time, across journals, and across subject areas). When the lag is greater than two years (which it often is), a publication’s 5-Year Journal Impact Factor will tend to be higher than its Journal Impact Factor. Journal Impact Factor and 5-Year Journal Impact Factor will typically be identical for the first two years that a publication is covered in the JCR.

How It's Calculated

The number of citations in the JCR year ÷ total number of articles published in the 5 previous years = 5-year Journal Impact Factor

The 5-Year Journal Impact Factor measurement is the same as the Journal Impact Factor, but with three more years added to both the numerator and the denominator. Instead of a two-year window, it is a five-year window.

The calculation is factored in the same manner as the Journal Impact Factor, but considers a five-year window of citation data.

5 Year Impact Factor & Ranking

• 2018 – Ranking
• Food science & technology 1 128 #35
• 2019 – Ranking
• 2020 – Ranking
• Food science & technology 1 140 #43
• 2021 – Ranking
• Food science & technology 1 141 #47
• 2022 – Ranking
• Food science & technology 1 142 #51
• Impact Factor 5 year

About 5 Year Impact Factor & Ranking

Impact Factor based on 5 years of history. Copyright Clarivate Analytics.

• Impact Factor

A base of five years may be more appropriate for journals in certain fields because the body of citations may not be large enough to make reasonable comparisons, or it may take longer than two years to publish and distribute leading to a longer period before others cite the work.

Actual value is intentionally only displayed for the most recent year. Earlier values are available in the Journal Citation Reports from Clarivate Analytics.

ISI ranking

Journals are often ranked by Impact Factor in an appropriate Clarivate Analytics subject category. As there are now two Impact Factors published – two-year and five-year Impact Factors – this rank may differ, so care is needed when assessing these ranked lists to understand which of the two metrics is being used. In addition, journals can be categorized in multiple subject categories, giving them different ranks for each subject. Consequently, a rank should always be in context to the subject category.

other metrics in impact

• Article Influence & Eigenfactor

Journal Profile

Each journal covered in the Journal Citation Reports has a Journal Profile page providing a comprehensive overview of related information and Key Indicators , allowing users to see multiple years of data in a glance. Information related to the journal's publisher, location, and publication frequency, and other criteria relevant are presented at the top of the page beneath the title. 

The Journal Profile page also provides access to detailed information about the journal, data, metrics and content underlying the journal’s listing in the JCR.

The profile provides the following information:

Select the year (the most recent, a previous year, or All Years to all available data summarized).

Journal Information Journal Impact Factor (JIF) trend and calculation (with and without self-citations) Journal Impact Factor contributing items Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) trend Total Citations Citation Distribution Open access (OA) items and citations Rank by Journal Impact Factor (JIF) Rank by Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) Content metrics (source data and contributions by organizations and location) Additional metrics (Eigenfactor Score, Normalized Eigenfactor, Article Influence Score, and Immediacy Index)

The Journal information section contains:

Basic bibliographic information about the journal, including publisher, ISSN and e-ISSN (where available), open access status, language, frequency of publication, and Web of Science categorization.

A link to the current and previous years, plus an All Years summary.

In the top right of the journal profile page, you can either click on the heart icon to Favorite a journal or on the download icon to Export to PDF.

Selecting All Years for the journal profile displays yearly breakdown of key JCR metrics including the following indicators, which can be customized:

Total citations

Journal Impact Factor

JIF without Self-Cites

5-Year Impact Factor

Immediacy Index

Citable Items

Total Articles

Total Reviews

Cited Half-Life

Citing Half-Life

Eigenfactor Score

Article Influence Score

% Articles in Citable Items

Normalized Eigenfactor

Average JIF Percentile

The All Years journal profile grid can be downloaded using the Export link in a CSV format.

Beginning with the 2022 metrics, released in 2023, all journals in the Web of Science Core Collection will receive a JIF. This extends to the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) and Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) for the first time. Additionally, all JIF, JIF without self-cites, 5 Year JIF, and Immediacy Index values will be displayed to 1 decimal point from 2022 onwards. No change is being made to earlier years.

JIF values that would round down to 0 will be displayed as <0.1 going forward.

The interactive graph above shows the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and JIF Percentile Rank for the last five years in category. Hover over any point in the graph to see values.

The JIF trend is represented as a bar graph, and corresponds to the left-hand axis.

The JIF Percentile in Category is represented as line-and-marker graph, and corresponds to the right-hand axis. The 75th percentile gridline marks the lower boundary of the top quartile journal rank; the 50th percentile gridline marks the lower boundary of the second quartile journal rank; the 25th percentile gridline marks the lower boundary of the third quartile. Journals with a percentile rank below 25% are in the bottom quartile in that category.

Prior years are presented in ascending order, from the four years prior to the current JIF year to the current year. The current year JIF is highlighted, and represents the value shown above the graph. Hovering over any individual year displays the JIF for that year and the JIF Percentile rank for each category. Clicking any category in the legend will change the graph to show data for that category.

To see the full history of both JIF, JIF Percentile, and category assignment for a journal, click the View all years link.

The graph can be exported in a PDF format using the export link.

Beginning with the 2022 metrics released in June 2023, titles indexed in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) will have JIFs calculated. Only one year is being calculated for 2022; these journals will not have trend data to display until the 2023 release in June 2024.

Journal Impact Factor data for previous years is only displayed for journals in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI).

The tabbed Journal Impact Factor contributing items table displays:

Citable items – the full list of documents from the previous two years, their open access status, and their citation count (for the JIF year). These documents contribute the JIF calculation numerator (citations for JIF year) and denominator (number of citable items). Click any item to see more information or to view the full record in the Web of Science.

Citing Sources – the journals titles that generated the citations used in the JIF calculation for the JCR year. Click any source title to see the list of citing articles from that source. Click on the citing article to see the individual cited reference details. Both linked and unlinked cited references are shown here. Click export on either tab to download the table in CSV format.

Journal Citation Indicator (JCI)

The Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) is displayed in the profile for all titles covered in the Journal Citation Reports. The JCI was introduced in 2021 with the release of the 2020 metrics and was calculated back to 2017.

The JCI trend is represented as a bar graph.

The interactive graph shows the last five JCR years. The current year is highlighted and represents the value shown above the graph. Hovering over any years displays the JCI for that year.

The JCI is a normalized indicator and is not category dependent, journals in multiple categories will have a single JCI. The average JCI of any category is approximately 1.

Total Citations and Citation Distribution

The bar chart of Total Citations shows the total number of times that a journal has been cited by all Web of Science Core Collection sources included in the database in the JCR year. To see more data, click View all years .

The graph can be exported in a PDF format using the export link in the top right of the Total Citations tile

The Citation Distribution shows the frequency with which items published in the year or two years prior were cited in the JCR data year (i.e., the components of the calculation of the JIF). The graph has similar functionality as the JIF Trend graph, including hover-over data for each data point, and an interactive legend where hovering over a data element’s legend highlights that element in the body of the graph. In this way, users can view the specific contributions of Articles, Reviews, or Non-Citable (other) items to the JIF numerator.

Article Citation Median shows the median citation count in the JCR year for all items with the document type “Article” and published in the year or two years prior to the JCR data year. These items are counted in the JIF denominator as “citable items.” A journal that has an Article Citation Median value of “n/a” has no materials in the JCR denominator with the article document type.

Review Citation Median shows the median citation count in the JCR year for all items with the document type Review and published in the year or two years prior to the JCR data year. These items are also counted in the JIF denominator as “citable items.” A journal that has a Review Citation Median value of “n/a” has no materials in the JCR denominator with the review document type.

Items included in the Other category on the graph comprise the non-scholarly materials in the journal, including such things as Editorials, news items, correspondence, corrections, obituaries, etc. These are considered non-scholarly and are not counted as part of the denominator of the JIF, however, they may receive citations. Citations to the non-scholarly content are an important part of how the journal influences the scholarly literature, and are included in the JIF numerator.

Non whole-number medians are rounded up to the next highest whole number value to simplify display.

The number of unlinked citations is shown next to the graph on the left. The number and type of items that received no citations in the JIF year (Times cited = 0) is displayed on the right.

Open Access

This shows the contribution of open access (gold) to journal impact and how open access content contributes to a journal’s citations.

The two donut charts show a breakdown for published items and citations to those items. These charts cover items published in the journal in the JCR data year and in the previous two years. The count of citations is current up to the date of the JCR extraction.

For example, in the 2022 JCR data, released in June 2023, the Open Access data shows the publication model (OA or subscription/free to read) of materials published in 2020, 2021, 2022, and citations in 2022 to these items.

The identification of the OA types comes from Our Research (formerly ImpactStory), the same source used for Web of Science and InCites Open Access identification.

Learn more on our Open Access help page .

JIF and JCI Rank

The table ranks the journal by Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in its category by JCR year, or where a journal is in multiple categories, each category and corresponding edition (Science Citation Index Expanded or Social Science Citation Index). The list can be scrolled to view data from earlier years. The JIF rank, JIF quartile and JIF percentile are shown for each year (percentiles and quartiles are by rank). The current JCR year is highlighted and the rank for each category displayed at the top of the table.

Journals indexed in AHCI and ESCI are receiving a JIF for the first time with the 2022 metrics, released in June 2023. They will not however receive a rank, quartile, or percentile. These values will be calculated with the release of the 2023 metrics in June 2024. Learn more here .

The table ranks the journal according to the Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) in its category by JCR year, where a journal is in multiple categories, each category and corresponding edition (Science Citation Index Expanded or Social Science Citation Index). The list can be scrolled to view data from earlier years. The JCI rank, JCI quartile and JCI percentile are shown for each year (percentiles and quartiles are by rank). The current JCR year is highlighted and the rank for each category displayed at the top of the table.

Other Metrics

Content metrics provide information about the source items and contributions to the Journal Citation Reports

Source Data - shows the number of citable items in the JCR year.

Average JIF Percentile - this takes the sum of the JIF Percentile rank for each category under consideration, then calculates the average of those values. Individual category values are also shown.

Contributions by organizations - those that have contributed the most papers to the journal in the most recent three-year period.

Contributions by country/region - those that have contributed the most papers to the journal in the most recent three-year period.

Data for each tile can be downloaded using the Export link in a CSV format.

These are complementary metrics to help users better understand journal performance. Each tile shows data in a bar chart format for the previous five JCR years (where available).

Eigenfactor Score - this is a reflection of the density of the network of citations around the journal using 5 years of cited content as cited by the Current Year. It considers both the number of citations and the source of those citations, so that highly cited sources will influence the network more than less cited sources. The Eigenfactor calculation does not include journal self-citations.

Normalized Eigenfactor Score - this is the Eigenfactor score normalized, by rescaling the total number of journals in the JCR each year, so that the average journal has a score of 1. Journals can then be compared and influence measured by their score relative to 1.

Article influence Score - this normalizes the Eigenfactor Score according to the cumulative size of the cited journal across the prior five years. The mean Article Influence Score for each article is 1.00. A score greater than 1.00 indicates that each article in the journal has above-average influence.

Immediacy Index - this is the count of citations in the current year to the journal that reference content in this same year. Journals that have a consistently high Immediacy Index attract citations rapidly.

2023 Changes

Beginning with the 2022 metrics, released in 2023, all journals in the Web of Science Core Collection will receive a JIF. This extends to the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) and Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) for the first time. Additionally, all JIF, 5 Year JIF, and Immediacy Index values will be displayed to 1 decimal point from 2022 onwards. No change is being made to earlier years.

This displays a breakdown of the journal’s articles by Open Access (OA) type.

For a hybrid journal, one that publishes both OA content and subscription content, users can easily identify the number of articles published under a subscription access model and identify those published under Creative Commons licenses (gold open access).

The goal is to increase transparency around how these articles contribute to a journal’s citations.

The data included in these tiles summarizes the items published in the journal in both the JCR data year and the previous two years. For example, in the 2022 JCR data, released in June 2023, the open access data shows the publication model (OA or subscription) of materials published in 2020, 2021 and 2022, and citations in 2022 to these items.

The identification of the open access types comes from Our Research, the same source used for Web of Science and InCites open access identification.

Classifications Used in Web of Science

In the Web of Science Core Collection, we use a data feed from Our Research to identify five types of open access papers:

Gold - Hybrid

Free to Read

Green Published

Green Accepted

JCR uses only Gold OA for the donut graphs on the profile page. Additional OA data can be viewed on the Web of Science platform.

OA Classifications used in JCR

To show the relationship between OA status at publication and citations in the JCR data, the two gold OA types are grouped together. The Gold OA label on the JCR profile page refers to papers tagged as Gold or Gold - Hybrid in the Web of Science Core Collection. The data are current as of the time of JCR extraction from the Web of Science.

Subscription and Free to Read

Articles in the Web of Science identified as Free to Read (formerly Bronze)are labeled as such in the JCR. This is a relatively recent term, used by Our Research to describe content that is free to read on the publisher site, but not published under an OA license. Papers that are categorized as Green Published and Green Accepted in Web of Science are often subject to an embargo after initial publication and available to subscribers only for that time; these are included in the Subscription and free to read group.

All materials indexed as articles or reviews in Web of Science are counted as Citable Items in the denominator of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and the Immediacy Index. They represent the scholarly contribution of a journal to the literature. Citations to citable items account for nearly 98% of citations linked to journal content in Web of Science.

Any substantive, indexed item in the journal, such as editorial material, correspondence, news, meeting abstracts, etc., are non-citable items. These items are not counted as part of the scholarly content in the JIF denominator, and are grouped as other content in the JCR.

Citations in the JCR are aggregated according to the journal title, independently of whether they are linked to an individual item in the journal. Although the rate of linked citations can vary between journals, over 95% of citations in the JCR are linked to an item in the journal. Unlinked citations are included in all JCR citation metrics and are displayed specifically in the citation chart, therefore, it is important they are represented in the descriptive citation data in the OA data.

The current data was extracted from Our Research in April 2021 and will be periodically updated from the date of the release onwards

Read more about Open Access .

Journal and Article Metrics Guide

Download our PDF guide to understand more about journal and article metrics.

Understand journal and article metrics before you submit

When deciding where to submit your manuscript, consider a broad range of journal and article metrics to decide which journal will help you achieve your goals of getting the best reach, recognition and impact for your research.

Journal Metrics

Journal metrics are useful for evaluating the collective impact of the journal’s total output, not the impact of an author’s individual contribution. Most of the indices that supply journal-level metrics, are selective and employ a rigorous screening process that includes an assessment of the journal’s potential citation impact alongside quality control measures, such as the journal’s publication ethics standards, research integrity practices, peer review model, and other criteria.

Article Metrics

Metrics Most Commonly Displayed on Wiley Journals*

*Not every journal will have these metrics available. Clarivate and Scopus metrics require a journal to be indexed which is a selective process. If a journal has not applied for indexing, or has not been accepted for indexing, then it may not display all the available metrics. Indices contain a variety of metrics used to measure journal performance and impact. Visit the Index website to learn more about the available metrics. For more information about Wiley’s Open Research initiatives and opportunities to showcase and gain recognition for your individual contributions, visit the Open Research page .

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• Evaluation based on scientific publishing

Five-year Impact Factor

Evaluation based on scientific publishing: five-year impact factor.

• Citation analysis and databases containing citation information
• Subjective assessment methods
• Quantitative methods
• Citation metrics of journals
• - Journal Impact Factor, IF
• - SCImago Journal Rank indicator, SJR
• - Source normalized impact per paper, SNIP
• Other citation metrics
• Tools for journal evaluation
• - Publication Forum (JuFo)
• Other information sources for journal evaluation
• Evaluating books
• Evaluating conferences
• Ranking lists
• Institutional publication activity
• Publication Forum (Julkaisufoorumi, JUFO)
• Web of Science
• Journal Citation Reports
• CWTS - Journal Indicators and Leiden ranking
• SCImago Journal and Country Rank
• Google Scholar
• Publish or Perish
• Eigenfactor
• ScienceWatch ja in-Cites
• Journal Impact Factor, IF
• Eigenfactor, EF
• Article Influence, AI
• Journal Immediacy Index
• SCImago Journal Rank indicator, SJR
• Source normalized impact per paper, SNIP
• Raw Impact per Publication, RIP
• Field-Weighted Citation Impact, FWCI
• PageRank algorithm

The 5-year journal Impact Factor is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR edition year. It is caclulated by dividing the number of citations in the JCR edition year by the total number of articles published in the five previous years.

The five-year Impact Factor is available only in JCR 2007 and later years. Using an earlier JCR year as a starting point the five-year Impact Factor can be calculated by following the instructions ( http://admin-apps.isiknowledge.com/JCR/help/h_fiveyr_if.htm ) on web pages.

A diagram of five-year Impact Factor calculation.

The calculation of five-year Impact Factor for Genome Research. Image source: Journal Citation Reports (Thomson Reuters)< http://www.isiknowledge.com/ > 2.4.2009

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Call For Papers |

Scientific reports impact factor: “riding high”.

By Team ME ScholarHangout

Our research is usually based on the journal’s impact factor (IF), which denotes the significance of the work published in a specific journal. A scientist’s research is evaluated based on the impact factor, representing a journal’s prestige. An article’s impact factor is determined by how many times it was cited in a particular year. A report by Clarivate Analytics, Web of Science Journal Citation Reports (WoS JCR), includes Journal Impact Factors each year.

Recently, it has been found that Scientific Reports, a journal of Nature Publishing Group with an option of open-access, is gaining popularity and importance among researchers for its wide coverage of all research areas, such as natural sciences, medicine, psychology, and engineering. The main reason this journal is a researcher’s choice is its publishing house and ease of publication than other core journals of Nature.

Scientific Reports Journal metrics

• Scientific Reports is the fifth most-cited journal in the world as per Clarivate Analytics, 2020 (2021 Journal Citation Reports).
• Scientific Reports is Web of Science, PubMed, Scopus, Google Scholar, and DOAJ-indexed, enhancing its credibility.
• Scientific Reports’ impact factor in 2022-23 is 4.997 as per the latest update.
• The 2-year and 5-year impact factors are 4.996 and 5.516, respectively. Even though it marks a slight decrease, the difference is not high enough.
• Although Scientific Reports’ impact factor is not high, it is still a prominent option to publish as it has a smooth publication process and accepts quality content in a wide range.

Scientific Reports Peer-review Policy

Scientific Reports’ review time includes its first decision in 56 days and the acceptance time of 133 days. Since it publishes scientific content of robust quality and maintains originality, Scientific Reports’ acceptance rate is 49% which is good for any journal as it has a rigorous peer-review process.

Scientific Reports is a high-impact journal, although its IF is less because of its experienced and extensive editorial team that adheres to a constructive peer-review process and follows all editorial and ethical policies.

To maintain the journal’s high impact and quality, the journal charges an APC after the paper is accepted, which may vary, starting from €1,570.

A global journal such as Scientific Reports ranks higher than 77% of the journals with an impact factor.

For more exciting content, do visit our website https://www.manuscriptedit.com/scholar-hangout/ . You can also mail us at [email protected] for your queries. Happy reading!!!

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Scientometrics

Scientific reports, how influential is scientific reports.

(New) Scientific Reports Impact Factor: Understanding the Metrics of Scientific Research: 2023-24

Scientific Reports Impact Factor – Scientific Reports is an open-access journal published by the Nature Research group that covers a broad range of scientific disciplines. It has gained popularity among researchers due to its fast publication times and wide readership. One of the metrics used to measure the impact of a journal is its impact factor . In this article, we will delve deeper into the scientific reports impact factor, what it means, and why it matters.

Table of Contents

1. What is the Scientific Reports Impact Factor?

The scientific reports impact factor is a metric that measures the average number of citations received by articles published in the journal over a two-year period. It is calculated by dividing the total number of citations by the total number of articles published in the journal during that time. The impact factor provides an indication of the journal’s influence and prestige within its field.

a. Scientific Reports Impact Factor List

Scientific Reports Update Impact Factor List

2. How is the Impact Factor Calculated?

The impact factor is calculated annually by Clarivate Analytics, which publishes the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The JCR provides a list of journals and their respective impact factors. To calculate the impact factor, Clarivate Analytics counts the number of citations received by articles published in the journal during the previous two years and divides it by the total number of articles published in the journal during the same period.

Nature Communications Impact Factor

3. Why is the Impact Factor Important?

The impact factor is important because it is widely used as a measure of a journal’s quality and influence. Researchers often consider the impact factor when deciding where to submit their work for publication. Similarly, funding agencies and academic institutions may use the impact factor when evaluating the research output of individuals or groups. High-impact factor journals may also attract more readers, which can increase the visibility and impact of individual articles.

4. The Pros and Cons of Using the Impact Factor

• Provides a measure of a journal’s influence and prestige
• Can be used to evaluate the quality and impact of research
• Can be used to evaluate the performance of individuals or groups
• High-impact factor journals may attract more readers and citations
• The impact factor may be influenced by a small number of highly cited articles, which can skew the results
• The impact factor may not reflect the quality or impact of individual articles
• The impact factor may not be an accurate reflection of a journal’s quality or influence within a specific field
• Over-reliance on the impact factor may encourage researchers to prioritize publishing in high impact factor journals over conducting high-quality research

5. What is a Good Impact Factor?

A “good” impact factor varies depending on the field and discipline. Journals with impact factors above 5 are generally considered to be highly influential and prestigious, while journals with impact factors below 1 are considered to be less influential. However, it is important to note that the impact factor should not be the sole determinant of a journal’s quality or influence.

6. How to Improve the Impact Factor of Scientific Reports?

There are several ways in which the impact factor of Scientific Reports can be improved:

• Increase the number of articles published in the journal
• Encourage more citations of articles published in the journal
• Attract high-quality submissions from top researchers
• Increase the visibility and readership of the journal

7. Alternative Metrics for Measuring Journal Impact

While the impact factor is a widely used metric for measuring the impact of journals, it is not without its limitations. As a result, alternative metrics have been developed to provide a more nuanced view of a journal’s impact. Some of these alternative metrics include:

• Article-level metrics (ALMs): These metrics provide data on the individual articles published in a journal, such as the number of views, downloads, and social media mentions. ALMs can provide a more granular view of the impact of individual articles.
• Altmetrics: Altmetrics measure the online attention and impact of scholarly articles, including mentions in social media, news media, and blogs. Altmetrics can provide a broader view of the impact of research beyond traditional citation metrics.
• Eigenfactor Score: The Eigenfactor Score measures the influence of a journal based on the number of citations it receives, as well as the influence of the journals that cite it. This metric takes into account the quality of the journals that are citing a particular journal.

8. Conclusion

The scientific reports impact factor is an important metric for measuring the quality and influence of the journal. It provides a measure of the average number of citations received by articles published in the journal over a two-year period. While the impact factor has its limitations, it remains a widely used metric for evaluating the quality and impact of research. Alternative metrics such as ALMs, altmetrics, and the Eigenfactor Score can provide a more nuanced view of a journal’s impact.

• What is a good impact factor for Scientific Reports (Scientific Reports Impact Factor)? A good impact factor varies depending on the field and discipline. Journals with impact factors above 5 are generally considered to be highly influential and prestigious, while journals with impact factors below 1 are considered to be less influential.
• How is the impact factor calculated? The impact factor is calculated by dividing the total number of citations received by articles published in the journal over a two-year period by the total number of articles published in the journal during that time.
• What are alternative metrics for measuring journal impact? Alternative metrics for measuring journal impact include article-level metrics (ALMs), altmetrics, and the Eigenfactor Score.
• Can the impact factor be influenced by a small number of highly cited articles? Yes, the impact factor may be influenced by a small number of highly cited articles, which can skew the results.
• Is the impact factor the sole determinant of a journal’s quality or influence? No, the impact factor should not be the sole determinant of a journal’s quality or influence. Other factors such as the quality of individual articles, the reputation of the editorial board, and the relevance of the journal to a particular field should also be considered.

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Journal Impact Factor

(Latest) Scientific Reports Impact Factor 2023

Here in this post, apart from Scientific Reports Impact Factor, I have tried to compile all the necessary information a research scholar would seek before publishing an article in the journal.

About Scientific Reports Journal

Scientific Reports  is the 6th most-cited journal in the world, with more than 540,000 citations in 2020, and receives widespread attention in policy documents and the media.

It was launched in 2011 and is published by nature portfolio .

Impact Factor

Scientific reports impact factor.

Impact Factor (IF) or often called journal impact factor (JIF) is an index provided by an analytics company named  Clarivate.  The impact factor is calculated by dividing the number of times the articles are cited in the last two years by the total number of publications in those two years.

• Total Citations in 2020 and 2021 =  500
• Total Number of Publications in 2020 and 2021 =  100
• Impact Factor of the Journal in 2022 = 500/100 =  5

Scientific Reports Impact Factor (2019-2023)

• Scientific Reports Impact Factor 2017 – 4.122
• Scientific Reports Impact Factor 2018 – 4.011
• Scientific Reports Impact Factor 2019 – 3.998
• Scientific Reports Impact Factor 2020 – 4.380
• Scientific Reports Impact Factor 2021 – 4.996
• Scientific Reports Impact Factor 2022 – 4.6 (updated 29 June 2023)

Scientific Reports Impact Factor 2022 –

Scientific Reports H-index

The h index is a metric for evaluating the cumulative impact of an author’s scholarly output and performance; measures quantity with quality by comparing publications to citations.

The h index of Scientific Reports Journal is 212 , which means among all the published articles in this journal, 212 of these publications have received at least 212 citations each.

Scientific Reports Journal Metrics

United Kingdom

Publications

Open access, scientific reports citescore.

CiteScore (CS) of an academic journal is a measure reflecting the yearly average number of citations to recent articles published in that journal.

Scientific Reports SCImago Rank

The SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator is a measure of the scientific influence of scholarly journals that accounts for both the number of citations received by a journal and the importance or prestige of the journals where the citations come from.

Scientific Reports Editorial Board Members

Below are the latest editorial board members of Scientific Reports

• Dr Carlo Cannistraci
• Dr Joana Maria Ramis
• Professor Xiaochun Li
• Professor Luciano Bosso
• Dr Ryoung Shin
• Dr. Alberto G. Fairén
• Professor Xuyang Lu
• Professor Matjaž Perc
• Professor Yu Xin Zhang
• Professor Z. Altounian
• Dr Lena Ciric
• Professor Kah-Wee Ang
• Dr Pedro Oliveira
• Dr. Ciria C. Hernandez
• Professor Claudia RC Moreno
• Professor Jimin Zhao
• Professor Amy Peterson
• Dr. Jagadeesh Bayry
• Professor Timothy Geary
• Dr. Leyla Soleymani
• Dr. Ruth Blasco
• Dr. Feng Gao
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Evolution of number of citations per article in Materials Science: possible causes and effect on the impact factor of journals

• Open access
• Published: 07 November 2023

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• Ana M. Ariza-Guerrero 1 &
• J. Sebastián Blázquez   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2318-5418 2  

Cite this article

An overall rise in the citation parameters used in the metrics of scientific publications (i.e. journal impact factor, JIF ) has taken place since the last decade of the previous century, coinciding with the electronic distribution of (and access to) scientific literature. This inflation like tendency is herein analyzed in the area of Materials Science and also affects the number of publications. Considering average JIF values, its growth is proportional to the number of publications in the area and to its JIF value, leading to an inhomogeneous boost that preferentially benefits those journals with high JIF . An elevation in the number of publications per year alone cannot explain this behavior but it occurs due to a continuous and widespread increment in the number of citations per article, which only remains limited when restrictions are applied by journals to the maximum number of pages per article. In this work we observe this positive correlation between the increase in the number of references per article and the overall increase in JIF but, in our analysis, a kink point is observed in consistency with the appearance of online databases, particularly those free available in 2004. Online databases along with the widespread of open access publishing option made the research content easily available to the scientific community contributing to an increasing trend (without apparent saturation) in the number of articles used to contextualize the new scientific contributions.

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

Introduction

Publication of scientific articles can be considered a final product in the scientific activity. In this sense, they are tangible results easy to be managed and evaluated by the Administration Authorities responsible for the financial support and academic career of researchers. Despite the evident incompleteness in the description of the progress in Science (MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 2018 ), bibliometric studies based on citation and journal metrics, and developed by Garfield (Garfield, 1955 ), allow for these comparative analyses. In 1976, the Institute for Scientific Information, ISI, launched Journal Citation Reports (JCR) as a tool to compare and rank the scientific journals. JCR orders the journal by relevance attending to the so-called journal impact factor, \(JIF\) . The definition of \(JIF\) for a certain journal in a year \(y\) is \(JIF\left(y\right)=\frac{{N}_{cites}(y)}{N\left(y-1\right)+N(y-2)}\) , where \({N}_{cites}\left(y\right)\) corresponds to the number of citations in year \(y\) to articles published in the journal in years \(y-1\) and \(y-2\) , whereas \(N\left(z\right)\) is the number of articles published in year \(z\) in that very journal. Thus \(JIF\) corresponds to the ratio between citations to articles published in the two previous years and the number of articles published in that period. Understanding \(JIF\) dependencies is of particular interest to both individual researchers and institutions. The influence of \(JIF\) on the way researchers publish their results has been huge, as it offers a quantitative and friendly usable frame to science founding administrations affecting salary, career promotions, resources distribution and prestige, despite it is not at all free from criticism (Dunleavy, 2022 ; Gorraiz et al, 2022 ; Law & Leung, 2020 ; MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 2018 ).

For certain article to be cited, its availability and easy distribution to possible users are crucial. This necessity of the scientific community to spread out its research achievements early motivated the development of ArXiv repository (Elizalde, 2021 ; Ginsparg, 2011 ). Physicist at CERN contributed to the development of internet and the World Wide Web (although invented in 1989 by the physicist Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web Consortium was founded in 1994 Footnote 1 ). This milestone supplied an extraordinarily effective tool that changed for good humankind thinking with respect to immediate access to information.

The reaction of ISI to the birth of internet was the development of Web of Science (WoS) platform in 1997, nowadays collecting information from different databases dating back to 1900. Since the appearance of WoS, databases consulting was easily available to every researcher with a computer and internet access, which did revolutionize the literature research and checking for scientist. Other competitors appear later on, Scopus and Google Scholar, both in 2004 (Cantu-Ortiz, 2018 ). The former, developed by Elsevier, included an innovative link to the full text of the article, speeding up the literature checking. This was later adopted by WoS (which recently, since 2021, included links to the authors’ preprint “first online”). Scopus database and metrics (Citescore launched in 2016 and freely available (Fang, 2021 )) have acquired enough relevance in academy to be competitive relative to WoS and considered for evaluation of the research. Both WoS and Scopus are available under subscription unlike the third academic search engine, Google Scholar, which is free.

Finally, open access publications, explicitly required by public funding in new calls (e.g. Horizon Europe Footnote 2 ), contribute to the availability of research documents to a much broader scientific community (Ghane et al, 2020 ). These free accessible articles can be found in fully open access journals and, as a suitable option for the author, in an increasing number of conventional journals regularly distributed under subscription. Recent studies (Dorta-González et al, 2020 ) do not find any deleterious effect on the open access articles, comparing the uncited articles whether they were open access or available under payment, except for the extreme quartiles, for which freely accesible articles are less (Q1) and more (Q4) uncited that those articles available under subscription in the same quartile. Gray (Gray, 2020 ) discusses the effect of article processing charges (APC) on generating inequalities between different countries depending on their wealth. In this sense, free repositories from public institutions (e.g. idus.us.es from University of Sevilla) are now promoted by public research investors. Footnote 3 Finally, altmetrics (interest from social media) correlations with open access and no-open access journals has also received some interest in recent works (Bray & Major, 2022 ; Vadhera et al, 2022 ; Wang, 2022 ).

Garfield already identified the importance of the average number of references to define the citation potential of a category (Garfield, 1979 ) and several studies proposed normalized factors such as the audience factor (Zitt & Small, 2008 ), the source normalized impact per paper (Moed, 2010 ) and the reference return ratio (Nicolaisen & Frandsen, 2008 ; Yuret, 2018 ).

However, despite several works have analyzed the effect of number of references per article in the number of citations received and the corresponding \(JIF\) , conclusions are not really clear and disagreement can be found between them. Among those reporting a positive correlation between larger number of references and higher \(JIF\) , Haslan and Koval ( 2010 ) found it for Social and Personality Psychology articles published in 1998. This correlation was also observed for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology journals (Didegah & Thelwall, 2013a ) and for Biology and Biochemistry, Chemistry and Social Sciences ones (Didegah & Thelwall, 2013b ). Finally, and more recently, Zhou et al. ( 2020 ) used Montecarlo simulations to support this interpretation. Mammola et al. ( 2022 ) recently reported several factors affecting citation, including the number of references.

However, several papers found that other parameters are more determinant than the number of references. Dorta-González and Dorta-González ( 2013 ) reported that the number of references per paper does not explain the differences between impact factors among categories. Falagas et al. ( 2013 ) analyzed citations in general medicine journals but unlike number of references, article length and number of authors were used to predict, independently, the number of citations. Patience et al. ( 2017 ) studying the 500 articles with more citations in different categories found more relevant the age of the references than their number with a higher number of citations for those articles that cite recent research. Finally, no conclusive results are reported in a recent work on Biomedical research (Urlings et al., 2021 ) concerning the number of references as determinant for citation bias.

The aim of this work is to show the coincidence between the overall increase in impact factor and the appearance of online databases and open access publications that allow the scientific community to easily and quickly access to scientific content to contextualize the new scientific contributions. This is shown for the JCR category of Materials Science, Multidisciplinary and particularly for several journals of the category. We compare the evolution of regular articles and letters and proceeding contributions, the latter being limited in maximum number of pages, which indirectly limits the number of references per article. Both types of articles, independently whether they are limited in the number of pages or not, seem to be benefited from the overall increase in the number of references per article in the category.

Databases used

Herein Journals Citation Reports (JCR) and Web of Science (WoS) resources from Clarivate have been used to obtain the data concerning the category Materials Science, Multidisciplinary (category Materials before year 2000). Results have been limited to Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and final date of searching 01/28/2022 (unless explicitly indicated). Concerning the analysis of the number of references per journal, we have excluded review articles as well as corrections, retractions, and editorials. This analysis has been limited to publications defined as articles but it also includes articles from proceedings. Five different journals have been taken as examples for a more detailed analysis.

Overall analysis of the Category Materials Science, Multidisciplinary

Time evolution of the category materials science, multidisciplinary.

From JCR database, the category of Materials Science, Multidisciplinary (in the following MSM) appears in 2000. However, using WoS database, it is possible to perform a search for “ Materials Science, Multidisciplinary (Web of Science Categories) ”, limited to SCIE, which returns results since 1900. WoS selection of journals has evolved with time. From 1900 up to 1944 a single journal is found in MSM: Philosophical Magazine (Taylor & Francis), which is still active. Table 1 collects the publishers with highest production in the category along with their respective country and the first year they appear in WoS (MSM search). Possible bias in WoS has been claimed favoring English language journals (MacRoberts & MacRoberts, 2018 ) and its effects are recently analyzed in Social Science Citation Index data base (Vanderstraeten & Vandermoere, 2021 ).

Figure 1 a shows the evolution in the number of journals in MSM category (taking into account that the values before 2000 correspond to “ Number of Publication Titles ” as ascribed by WoS to this category). Figure 1 a also shows the number of articles per journal and Fig. 1 b shows the number of articles per year in MSM category along with the percentage of the number of open access articles. Globally, from over 2.28·10 6 articles collected in MSM (search in WoS June, 16th 2023), about 20% (0.45·10 6 articles) are open access.

a left axis: Number of journals in “Materials Science, Multidisciplinary” category as a function of the year of publication. Solid symbols correspond to data from JCR (starting in 2000). Hollow symbols correspond to data from WoS (available from 1900 and here limited to 2000); and right axis: number of papers per journal. b left axis: Number of articles (black solid squares) and open access articles (red solid circles); and right axis: percentage of open access articles (green hollow circles) as a function of the year of publication. Data taken June 16th, 2023. (Color figure online)

A first rise in the number of journals in the category is observed after 1960 when the journals in MSM exceeded 10 and the articles published per year rapidly increased, coincidentally, one order of magnitude. However, since the 90’s, contemporary to the development of internet (Zhang,  1998 ), an exponential rise is continuing up to date in both the number of articles and the number of journals assigned to the category. Since 1990, the number of articles per journal in a year has also steadily increased, being nowadays roughly fivefold the value before 1980. This increment is statistically meaningful and must be linked to the increase of scientific demand for publication space, which exceeds the offer from increasing the number of journals. Moreover, the availability of such space was offered by less limited electronic journals (e.g. Interpersonal Computing and Technology Journal in 1993 (Collins & Berge, 1994 ). Nowadays, almost every journal has electronic version. These versions rapidly overcame the distribution of printed versions (Trajkovski, 2018 ).

Electronic journals available in Materials Science, Multidisciplinary

Concerning the subject category of interest in this work, MSM, among the 414 journals listed in 2021 JCR, only 14 (3.4%) do not have an e-ISSN but only two of them do not directly have a link in their web page to full content ( SAMPE journal and Journal of Materials Education , both in Q4). On the other hand, 49 journals (11.8%) only have an e-ISSN. Among these journals, 27 are still in the Emerging Source Citation Index (ESCI) and do not have a \(JIF\) . That database appeared in 2015 to account for the rapidly emerging academia journals and collects the journals that meet the 24 quality criteria of WoS but not the 4 other impact criteria that would allow the journal to be included in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) (Huang et al, 2017 ; Filipo & Gorraiz, 2020 ). However, these journals have the new Journal Citation Indicator ( \(JCI\) ) which is the normalized impact factor of the corresponding category (Huh, 2021 ). The normalized index was proposed to allow comparing between different categories. This avoids the boost behavior observed in \(JIF\) . Among the 49 e-ISSN journals only with electronic version, 12 are in the Q1 of the MSM category. Concerning the capability of electronic journals to increase the number of articles per year, whereas the average number of articles per journal in 2021 in MSM was 326, this number increased to 675 when considering those 49 journals only with e-ISSN. An even higher value of 1109 articles per journal is obtained discarding from this set those journals without JIF . Studies on the effect of electronic sources on the scientific production and citation appeared soon after the rise in number of electronic sources, e. g. Zhang (Zhang,  1998 ) analyzed the period from 1994 to 1996 in the in the area of Library and Information Science. At that moment, they found some bias for articles published in electronic journals to cite more articles published in that sort of journals than it occurs for articles published in print journals. Nowadays, more than 25 years ago almost all the other journals in the category have an available electronic version.

Open access articles in Materials Science, Multidisciplinary

Finally, it is worth mentioning the relevance that open access articles, including those from open access journals as well as those individually selected as open access (see Fig. 1 ), are acquiring with respect to the total number of publications, reaching 40% in 2021. This indicates increasingly large and easily accessible information freely available to the research community of this scientific area. The role of electronic journals is crucial also to understand the immediacy of access to new results from the scientific community which is directly affecting the overall increase of \(JIF\) (Althouse et al, 2009 ; Trajkovski, 2018 ). Nowadays, journals anticipate the publication of the articles as preprints or uncorrected proofs. In some cases, this provisional version can be accessed the year previous to its volume publication and this could affect the corresponding \(JIF\) calculation. This will be briefly commented in next section when analyzing the five selected journals of this study.

We compare the behavior of two journals with similar \(JIF\) but one open access (Metals from MDPI, \(JIF=2.695\) ) and other distributed under subscription (JOM, from Springer, \(JIF=2.597\) ) both in Q3. In 2020, Metals published 1699 open access articles and was cited till now (April 12th 2023) by 11,535 articles. In the same year, JOM published 543 articles from which 178 were open access. The remaining 365 articles were cited by 1893 articles, whereas the 178 open access articles were cited by 893 articles (differences in the ratio are not significant). In both cases self-journal citation is the highest contribution (13.3 and 5.2% of the total citations for Metals and JOM, respectively). Considering only those journals that represent above 0.5% of the total citations to articles published in 2020 in Metals and JOM (summing up to 50.2 and 41.9% of the total citations), we found that from them, open access journals represent 3/5 for Metals and less than ¼ for JOM. Limiting the citing articles only to open access (independently of the open access character of the journal), we found 55% of citations to Metals come from open access articles, whereas only 35% of citations to JOM articles corresponds to open access articles. Recently, Momeni et al. (Momeni et al., 2021 ) concluded that the shift to open access of journals generally led to an enhancement in their bibliometric qualification.

Quantitative evolution of journal impact factor in Materials Science, Multidisciplinary

Figure 2 shows the correlation between mean \(JIF\) values for the different quartiles of MSM and the total number of publications in the MSM category, \({N}_{MSM}\) , for the corresponding year of publication. Both parameters exponentially increase with time (see Fig.  1 for \({N}_{MSM}\) ) and they are linearly correlated. As it is shown in the inset of Fig. 2 , the slope of the linear dependence observed for \(\langle JIF\rangle\) versus \({N}_{MSM}\) , for the same period of time (2000–2020), linearly increases with mean impact factor, \(\langle JIF\rangle\) , for a certain range (e.g. Figure 2 shows this for the quartiles but this can be extended for any region where \(a<JIF<b\) ). Therefore:

where \(k=\left(6.71\pm 0.15\right){10}^{-6}\) and the subindex indicates the \(\left[a,b\right]\) range analyzed (in Fig. 2 they corresponds to the different quartiles and the values over whole MSM). From this normalization law, it can be inferred that, as a first approximation, the increase in \(JIF\) is proportional to the number of publications in the category and to \(JIF\) . This relative change in the average \(JIF\) in a certain range proportional to the number of articles published in the category ( \(\Delta {\langle JIF\rangle }_{\left[a,b\right]}/{\langle JIF\rangle }_{\left[a,b\right]}=k{N}_{MSM}\) ) is an indication of the non-homogenous distribution of citations over the journals in the category but those with a higher \(JIF\) are more benefited than those with a lower one as it is evident from the increasing slopes of the fitted straight lines to the data of different quartiles in Fig. 2 .

Evolution of the \(\langle \mathrm{JIF}\rangle\) as a function of the year for the total MSM category and for each of the different quartile ranges. The inset shows the linear correlation between the slope of the straight lines in the main panel and the corresponding \(\langle \mathrm{JIF}\rangle\) in 2020

This preferential increase is shown in Fig. 3 a which plots the increase in \(JIF\) from 2000 (first appearance of MSM category) to 2020 (i.e. \(\Delta JIF={JIF}^{\left[2020\right]}-{JIF}^{\left[2000\right]}\) as Y axis) for the 106 journals that belong to MSM during that period as a function of their corresponding \(JIF\) in 2020 (i.e. \({JIF}^{\left[2020\right]}\) as X axis). Increase in \(JIF\) calculated without self-citations is also shown. We can find a linear correlation for both, which allows us to estimate an expected average \(\langle \Delta JIF\rangle\) increase as a function of \(JIF\) value in 2020. Figure 3 b shows the deviation of each journal with respect to its corresponding average value as a function of the increase in the number of articles of the journal per year. We can find that most of the journals in MSM have increased their number of articles per year but there is no clear correlation between this parameter and the deviation of actual increase in \(JIF\) with respect to the expected \(\langle \Delta JIF\rangle\) of the journal from 2000 to 2020.

a Increase in JIF from 2000 to 2020 for each journal active in MSM category during this period (total 106 data) as a function of JIF value in 2020. b Deviation of actual JIF from expected JIF from linear behavior from (a) as a function of relative increase in the number of articles published from 2000 to 2020

An overall increase in the number of articles in the category should lead to an expected increase in the number of citations as there are more documents published on the subject and, therefore, susceptible to cite articles published in the journal of interest. For example, assuming that, on average, an article published one or two years before the calculation year \(y\) in the journal \(A\) has a probability to be cited in year \(y\) equal to \(p\left(A,y\right)\) by a research developed in the area and published in that year \(y\) , \({N}_{cites}\left(A,y\right)\) can be related with the total number of articles published in the category as \({N}_{cites}\left(A,y\right)\sim p\left(A,y\right){N}_{MSM}\left(y\right)\) (neglecting citations from papers from out of MSM categories). However, the increase in number of articles per year in the journal would be deleterious for \(JIF\) as it appears in the denominator of its definition. In the period from 1997 to 2020, the whole number of articles per year in MSM, \({N}_{MSM}\left(y\right)\) , increased with a ratio \(\frac{{N}_{MSM}\left(2020\right)}{{N}_{MSM}\left(1997\right)}=4.42\) , whereas \(\langle JIF\rangle\) ratio increased ~ 6, independently of the quartile range. Moreover, as shown in Fig. 1 , the number of articles per journal has shown an overall increase with time with a ratio of 2.55 in the period from 1997 to 2020. Therefore, from these ratios we can explore the evolution of the probability of an article in an average journal \(A\) to be cited by a research in the MSM category, \(p\left(A\right)\) , in the two years following its publication:

This equation indicates that the probability of an average journal \(A\) in MSM category to be cited in an article in the category has decreased in 2020, being 53% of that in 1997, even though the value of \(JIF\) has steadily increased. Anyhow, as the total number of articles in MSM increases with time, the number of citations increased in 2020 to be close to threefold that of 1997.

This increase cannot be explained merely by the increase in the number of publications because the increased number of citations must be distributed among the increased number of publications. Therefore, the even faster increase with time for \(\langle JIF\rangle\) than for the total number of articles must be explained by a continuous increase in the average number of references per article. This trend has been studied by Mammola et al. (Mammola et al, 2021 ) on ecological journals and would be analyzed in the following section considering individual journals of MSM.

Detailed analysis of five journals of the category Materials Science, Multidisciplinary

In order to go deeper in our analysis, we selected five journals from MSM category published by Elsevier, which is the main editorial for this category (nowadays, close to 30% of the articles in WoS category Materials Science, Multidisciplinary): Acta Materialia (AM), Scripta Materialia (SM), Journal of Alloys and Compounds (JAC), Material Letters (ML), and Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials (JMMM) (Table 2 ).

Two of the selected journals (SM and ML) are devoted to publication of short communications or letters and have a limitation in the number of pages. Except JMMM, which is devoted to the magnetism of materials, the rest of selected journals are generalist in the area.

Although not every journal has increased the number of articles per year (AM and SM are almost constant, whereas JAC continuously increases, see Fig. 4 ), it is observed an overall increase in the number of references per article, except for ML where the limitation in the number of pages to 4 may be the reason why the number of references in an article stabilizes around 15 (Fig. 4 ). Length restriction in ML is now even stricter than previously, e.g. in 1997, 36.4% of the articles have 5 pages and 27.6% have 6 pages or more, whereas in 2020, 23.6% of the articles have 5 pages and only 1.2% have 6 pages or more). However, in the case of SM, also with limitation in the number of pages, this criterion was not strictly observed. In fact, although 4–5 pages limitation appears in the guide for authors of SM, taking volume 212 (15 April 2022) as an example with 28 regular articles appearing, only 1 article has 4 pages, 14 have 5 pages, 10 have 6 pages and even 3 have 7 pages so around 50% of the articles exceed the limitation in the number of pages. When limitation in the number of pages is strict, reference lists are reduced. This occurs for JAC volumes collecting proceedings from scientific conferences. Taking articles from proceedings in the period from 2000 to 2015, the number of references is almost constant about 18 ± 2, whereas for the regular articles, the average number of references per article continuously increases from 18.7 to 34.4 in the same period. Figure  4 shows the correlation between number of pages and number of references in a year in the case of JAC for regular articles and proceedings articles. Proceedings articles also include those from keynotes and similar ones which length is not limited as a general contribution to that volume. In recent years, JAC has strongly reduced the number of issues devoted to conference proceedings. This type of contribution corresponds to above 50% of the number of articles published by JAC in 1997 and generally more than 20% up to 2007. However, they became sporadic since 2016, mainly corresponding to keynotes and similar contribution without strong limitation in the number of pages (in fact, isolated point for 2018 in Fig.  4 and inset corresponds just to 55 proceedings contributions from a total of 3775 articles published in JAC that year). To end with this point, taking into account the reference format used in the journals here described (two columns), between 50 and 60 references would occupy a complete page.

Evolution of the average number of pages with year of publication (left) and average number of references vs. average number of articles in each year (right) published in JAC distinguishing between (black solid squares) regular articles, (red hollow circles) proceeding articles. The blue line corresponds to the linear fitting of the 2010-2021 period (regression coefficient r = 0.992) Bars show the standard deviation. Statistics were done over a maximum of 1000 articles when available. (Color figure online)

The relationship between number of pages and number of references is not simple. Data corresponding to regular articles previous to 2005 remain with a stable number of references per article, about 15 to 20, although the average number of pages increases up to 7. Therefore, previous to 2005, despite the strong influence of citations in the journals qualification as well as for scientists (Vincent & Ross, 2000 ), we assume that the facilities that makes possible a wide and easy access to the relevant literature were still not available. Coinciding with the launch of Scopus and Google Scholar in 2004, the triggering for the increase in the number of citations took place.

Figure  5 allows us to identify a clear rise in the number of references per article that occurs around 2005 (except for ML for which limitation in the number of pages presumably blocked this behavior). This fact coincides with the development of new electronic databases such as Scopus and Google Scholar, and particularly the former presenting the capability of direct access to full content via link in the case of Elsevier journals. In addition, during the revision procedure of a research article is typical the recommendation from the reviewers to increase the number of references (whether they supply specific ones or ask for an extended contextualization of the problem). Despite the possibility of misconduct from reviewers to increase citations, recent studies show that this is relatively limited (Baas & Fennell, 2019 ). All these requirements are in the internet era much easier to be fulfilled.

Number of articles and references per article as a function of the year of publication for Acta Materialia (AM), Scripta Materialia (SM), Journal of Alloys and Compounds (JAC), Materials Letters (ML), and Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials (JMMM)

The roughly twofold increase in the average number of references per article observed in the period from 1997 to 2020, combined with the above mentioned increment in the number of journals do overcome the increase in the number of articles per journal and is the reason for the ~ 500% increase in \(\langle JIF\rangle\) described above. Concerning AM and SM, they keep a stable number of articles per year. Therefore, these journals take the advantages of the increase in the number of articles published in the category and the number of references per article in journals of the category, whereas the denominator of the \(JIF\) formula is not affected. The enhancement in \(JIF\) in the period from 1997 to 2020 is larger for AM (560%) and SM (770%) than the average in the category for those \(JIF\) values (see Fig.  2 ), whereas for JAC, with a clear continuous increase in the number of published articles per year, the corresponding increase in \(JIF\) is lower (410%). However, this apparently logical trend is not an evident general rule as no clear correlation is observed in Fig.  3 b.

Concerning the success of a journal, Fig.  6 shows the evolution of \(JIF\) for the different analyzed journals along with the average number of citations per year, \({n}_{cite}\) , calculated as:

where \(y\) is the year of publication and \(\sum_{j=y}^{2022}{N}_{cites}\left(j\right)\) is the sum of the total number of citations for the publication year to 2022 (i.e. unlike \(JIF\) , \({n}_{cite}\) is accumulative and does not restrict the time from publication to citation).

Average number of citations per year and \(\mathrm{JIF}\) for the different studied journals as a function of the year of publication

A good correlation is observed between \({n}_{cite}\) and \(JIF\) (see Fig.  7 ) except for the highest \(JIF\) values for each journal that, taking into account the continuous increase in \(JIF\) , correspond to the most recent years. The decay in \({n}_{cite}\) observed at high \(JIF\) is understood as indicative of an average delay that recent articles have before they become regularly used in the research community. At the moment of the redaction of this work, \(JIF\) values are available from JCR from 1997 up to 2020. However, citations taken from WoS are collected up to February 2022. Therefore, we can identify a roughly common behavior for the journals analyzed in this work: an article requires about 3 to 4 years to become regularly used, which is in agreement with the time required by a regular article to reach its maximum number of citations per year as described by Costas et al. ( 2010 ) and the 3-year window earlier assumed by Glänzel and Schoepflin ( 1995 ). Once this regularity is achieved, a linear correlation with a slope close to 1 is found between \({n}_{cite}\) and \(JIF\) , although higher for the journal with a relative better rank position in the category.

Correlation between \({\mathrm{n}}_{\mathrm{cite}}\) and \(\mathrm{JIF}\) . Line corresponds to a straight line with slope 1 and null intercept

Some authors (e.g. Krauss, 2007 ) point to the self-citation in journals and how this can lead to an artificial increase in \(JIF\) . On the one hand, this could be justified when the subject covered by the journal is very specific and correspondingly citations would be frequently taken from that very article. In order to briefly comment on this point concerning the explored category and journals, we can define a relative self \(JIF\) , as:

with \({JIF}_{j}\) the impact factor of the journal \(j\) , and \({JIF}_{j}^{out}\) (available from JCR) the journal impact factor calculated after excluding citations from the same journal. This is shown in Fig.  8 a as a function of \(JIF\) for the different journals analyzed herein. Moreover, we define a normalized self \(JIF\) , \({r}_{JIF}^{self}\) , to account not only for the number of citations from the very journal but also for the relative weight of that journal in the number of articles published in the category. Thus this parameter is defined for each year as:

Self \(\mathrm{JIF}\) for the different journals analyzed herein. a \({\mathrm{S}}^{\mathrm{JIF}}\) (in %) calculated as the relative difference between JIF calculated using all citations and excluding citations from the very journal. b \({\mathrm{r}}_{\mathrm{JIF}}^{\mathrm{self}}\) , calculated as the normalized value of \({\mathrm{S}}^{\mathrm{JIF}}\) once considered the number of articles published in the corresponding year in that journal

where \({N}_{MSM}\) is the number of articles in the category, \({N}_{j}\) is the number of articles in journal \(j\) . Results are shown in Fig.  8 b. As it can be observed, interpretation of these data must be taken with care. In the case of JAC, \({S}^{JIF}\) appears to be relatively high with respect to the other journals. However, this is due to the large number of articles yearly published by this journal. Once \({r}_{JIF}^{self}\) is considered, JAC is even found with the lowest value among the analyzed journals. Independently of the parameter considered, ML is placed in the low values region, except for a general rise observed for \(JIF\le 1\) . This journal is the only one among those analyzed herein for which the number of references per article is constant with time. We assume that this is an indirect consequence of the strict limitation on the number of pages. We found no journal instructions concerning the number of references in the article.

Figure  9 shows the number of citations per year as a function of the number of references for all the published articles of the five analyzed journals along with the average values of each journal corresponding to each year (plotted in Fig.  6 as a function of publication year and in Fig.  7 as a function of \(JIF\) ). The aim of this figure is to show that there is a certain correlation between the number of references and the citations per year an individual article receives and that this fact is almost independent of the journal. However, as average values show, the main factor ruling this dependence is the common increase with time of citations per year and the continuous increase in the number of references per article. However, this should be valid for articles published before 2018 (due to the average delay of about 3 to 4 years of an article to be used by the community).

Citations per article per year as a function of the number of references for articles published in the five analyzed journals. Small dots correspond to individual articles and large symbols to average values over each year

Delay time from submission to final publication is also affecting the availability of the research to the scientific community. Table 3 collects the characteristic times for the different journals analyzed here. Time to first decision, review time and publication time are taken from the corresponding web pages of the journals. As described in the journal web page, time to first decision includes rejected articles, which in the case of desk rejects might be particularly short times. Therefore, this time is much longer for any contribution which is finally published. Analogously, review time also considers rejects, including desk rejects, and for any published article must be longer. Finally, the interesting time for this study is the time from online availability to issue publication. This parameter is not directly available for each journal but this information is supplied for each individual article. Therefore, we have estimated this time from averaging the corresponding time gap for the articles published in the last completed issue at the moment of redaction of these lines (15th June 2023). The error shown in the last column of Table 3 corresponds to the average deviation from the average value in the corresponding issue.

Although the article is available since it is published online, \(JIF\) calculation is referred to the full reference date of publication. Among the analyzed journals, this time is always above 2 months and can be as large as 5 months for JAC.

This anticipation is typically found independently of the publisher: e.g. combining April and May 2023 issues of top journal of MSM Nature Materials (Springer), which publishes regular articles, the average time from online publication to issue date is roughly 50 days. However, the average deviation is also around 50 days and some articles are available less than 10 days previous to issue date, whereas other articles of the same issue are available more than 200 days earlier. This anticipation in publishing gives the articles an extra time of visibility that will contribute to an enhancement in the citations during the period time considered for the calculation of \(JIF\) .

In this sense, journals are now supplying access to preliminary versions of the articles (i.e. previous to assignment of volume and publication date) that makes this contribution to be known by the scientific community in advance. This can affect the calculation of \(JIF\) , especially when preliminary versions are available in the previous year than the publication date.

On the other hand, Shi et al. ( 2017 ) showed that time gap between the submission and final publication of the articles can lead to inaccuracies in \(JIF\) calculation. Guo et al. ( 2021 ) have recently analyzed this negative effect on JIF and proposed a delay adjusted impact factor. They found a better match between corrected JCR ranking and highly reputed journals (e.g. NATURE INDEX, UTD 24).

Conclusions

A general increase in the number of references cited per article is found in the Materials Science, Multidisciplinary WoS category since, roughly, 2005. This occurs one year after the development of Scopus database that supplied a rapid access via a link to the full content (under subscription in most cases) of the research documents. However, when the number of articles is restricted, this indirectly affects the number of references made per article without which it is impossible to explain the notable continuous rise in the journal impact factors that, on average, grows linearly with the number of articles published in the category. It is also quite evident that higher the impact factor of the journal, greater the increase rate.

This increment in impact factor takes place despite the steady rise in the number of articles published per year in many journals. The number of articles per year of two cases studied here, Acta Materialia and Scripta Materialia, remained stable. They both gained two advantages, the increase in the number of articles published in the category and the number of references per article in journals of the category without the increase in their corresponding denominators of the \(JIF\) formula which explains their particular above average \(JIF\) level.

The simplicity of access and the immediate availability of the results of scientific research through World Wide Web is one of the key factors in the overall growth of the number of references cited. In this sense, database platforms such Web of Science (1997), Scopus (2004) or Google Scholar (2004) have provided us a tremendously successful tool. Open access journals and free scientific reservoirs, explicitly required by public funding in new calls, makes even more accessible scientific research to researchers.

Taking the advantages of reduced costs and flexibility of online publication, publishers are now anticipating the availability of the scientific results with respect to the correct citation date of publication of the corresponding issue which leads to a factual extension of the valid time for an article to be cited in the period time considered to calculate \(JIF\) .

However, several questions are open with respect to this apparently inflationary behavior. Is a saturation behavior expected? In our personal experience, the real amount of scientific content of research articles has not increased with time but the contextualization of the research has. In fact, the pressure felt by researchers to publish throughout their career (e.g. CV evaluation strongly dependent on the number of publications) is in contradiction with the accumulation of scientific results that would justify longest articles with a long reference list.

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All authors contributed to the study conception and design, as well as material preparation, data collection and analysis. The first draft of the manuscript was written by both authors and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. AMA-G: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing-original draft & review editing; JSB: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing-original draft & review editing.

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Ariza-Guerrero, A.M., Blázquez, J.S. Evolution of number of citations per article in Materials Science: possible causes and effect on the impact factor of journals. Scientometrics (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04863-7

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