Analysis of Generalized Impact Factor and Indices of Journals

TL;DR

This paper explores the relationships between impact factor, h-index, and g-index of journals using a generalized impact factor without a time window, simplifying analysis and deriving new expressions validated with real data.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized impact factor without a time window and derives formulas linking impact factor, h-index, and g-index, validated with actual publication data.

Findings

Impact factor converges to citations per paper without a time window.

Derived formulas relate impact factor, h-index, and g-index.

Validated relationships using real journal data.

Abstract

Analyzing the relationships among the parameters for quantifying the quality of research published in journals is a challenging task. In this paper, we analyze the relationships between impact factor, h-index, and g-index of a journal. To keep our analysis simple and easy to understand, we consider a generalized version of the impact factor where there is no time window. In the absence of the time window, the impact factor converges to the number of citations received per paper. This is not only justified for the impact factor, it simplifies the analysis of h-index and g-index as well because addition of a time window in the form of years complicates the computation of indices too. We derive the expressions for the relationships among impact factor, h-index, and g-index and validate them using a given set of publication-citation data.