Impact maturity times and citation time windows: The 2-year maximum journal impact factor

TL;DR

This paper introduces the 2M-JIF, a new journal impact metric that considers the maximum impact time window, aiming to improve cross-disciplinary comparability by accounting for varying impact maturity times.

Contribution

The study proposes the 2M-JIF, a novel impact indicator that uses a maximum rolling citation window to better reflect impact maturity across different scientific fields.

Findings

2M-JIF reduces variance between disciplines compared to traditional metrics.

Impact maturity times vary significantly across fields.

Using maximum impact windows improves cross-disciplinary journal comparisons.

Abstract

Journal metrics are employed for the assessment of scientific scholar journals from a general bibliometric perspective. In this context, the Thomson Reuters journal impact factors (JIF) are the citation-based indicators most used. The 2-year journal impact factor (2-JIF) counts citations to one and two year old articles, while the 5-year journal impact factor (5-JIF) counts citations from one to five year old articles. Nevertheless, these indicators are not comparable among fields of science for two reasons: (i) each field has a different impact maturity time, and (ii) because of systematic differences in publication and citation behaviour across disciplines. In fact, the 5-JIF firstly appeared in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) in 2007 with the purpose of making more comparable impacts in fields in which impact matures slowly. However, there is not an optimal fixed impact maturity time valid for all the fields. In some of them two years provides a good performance whereas in others three or more years are necessary. Therefore, there is a problem when comparing a journal from a field in which impact matures slowly with a journal from a field in which impact matures rapidly. In this work, we propose the 2-year maximum journal impact factor (2M-JIF), a new impact indicator that considers the 2-year rolling citation time window of maximum impact instead of the previous 2-year time window. Finally, an empirical application comparing 2-JIF, 5-JIF, and 2M-JIF shows that the maximum rolling target window reduces the between-group variance with respect to the within-group variance in a random sample of about six hundred journals from eight different fields.