Annual Journal citation indices: a comparative study

TL;DR

This study compares various citation impact measures for science journals over a decade, revealing strong correlations among them and questioning the uniqueness of the impact factor as a journal quality indicator.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of multiple citation metrics, demonstrating their high correlation and challenging the perceived uniqueness of the impact factor.

Findings

Different impact measures are strongly correlated.

Impact factor may not be a unique indicator of journal impact.

Distribution patterns of impact indices are similar across measures.

Abstract

We study the statistics of citations made to the indexed Science journals in the Journal Citation Reports during the period 2004-2013 using different measures. We consider different measures which quantify the impact of the journals. To our surprise, we find that the apparently uncorrelated measures, even when defined in an arbitrary manner, show strong correlations. This is checked over all the years considered. Impact factor being one of these measures, the present work raises the question whether it is actually a nearly perfect index as claimed often. In addition we study the distributions of the different indices which also behave similarly.