Abstract:

‘Impact factor (IF)’ has been practically the only indicator to assess journal quality. However, it has various problems associated with citation analysis, such as the effects of ‘different sizes of audience’ and ‘biased citation’. To overcome this, we here propose a new objective index, ‘perspective factor (PF)’, which estimates the journal quality independently of citation analysis. The relationship between IF and PF of life science journals published in 1997, for example, gives a positive correlation when we excluded review journals and extremely high-IF journals, which could not gain comparatively high PF values.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.3152/147154404781776374