A meta-analysis of impact factors of astrophysics journals

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the impact factors of astrophysics journals using NASA/ADS data, compares them to official metrics, and introduces a median-based impact factor to provide an alternative measure of journal influence.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive comparison of impact factors derived from NASA/ADS data with official impact factors and proposes a new median-based impact factor metric.

Findings

ADS-based impact factors are generally higher than official ones

Maximum difference in impact factors observed for Nature

JHEAP and PTEP show largest fractional differences in median-based impact factors

Abstract

We calculate the 2024 impact factors for the 38 most widely used journals in Astrophysics, using the citations collated by NASA/ADS (Astrophysics Data System) and compare them to the official impact factors. This includes journals which publish papers outside of astrophysics such as PRD, EPJC, Nature, etc. We also propose a new metric to gauge the impact factor based on the median number of citations in a journal and calculate the same for all the journals. We find that the ADS-based impact factors are mostly in agreement, albeit higher than the official impact factors for most journals. The journals with the maximum fractional difference in median-based and old impact factors are JHEAP and PTEP. We find the maximum difference between the ADS and official impact factor for Nature.