The effect of publishing a highly cited paper on journal's impact factor: a case study of the Review of Particle Physics

TL;DR

Publishing highly cited review articles in a journal temporarily boosts its impact factor, with the magnitude of this effect depending on the journal's existing impact factor and publication volume, highlighting limitations of impact factor as a metric.

Contribution

This study provides a detailed analysis of how highly cited review articles influence journal impact factors, emphasizing the variable effects based on journal characteristics.

Findings

Highly cited review articles can significantly increase a journal's impact factor.

The impact boost varies with the journal's existing impact factor and publication volume.

The results highlight limitations of using impact factor as a sole metric for journal evaluation.

Abstract

A single highly cited article can give a big but temporary lift in its host journal's impact factor evidenced by the striking example of "A short history of SHELX" published in Acta Crystallographica Section A. By using Journal Citation Reports and Web of Science's citation analysis tool, we find a more general and continuous form of this phenomenon in the Particle Physics field. The highly-cited "Review of Particle Physics" series have been published in one of the major Particle Physics journals biennially. This study analyses the effect of these articles on the Impact Factor (IF) of the host journals. The results show that the publication of Review of Particle Physics articles has a direct effect of lifting the IF of its host journal. However the effect on the IF varies according to whether the host journal already has a relatively high or low IF, and the number of articles that it publishes. The impact of these highly cited articles clearly demonstrates the limitations of journal impact factor, and endorses the need to use it more wisely when deciding where to publish and how to evaluate the relative impact of a journal.