A meta-analysis of impact factors of particle physics journals using NASA/ADS

TL;DR

This study calculates and compares impact factors of 16 particle physics journals using NASA/ADS data against official and median-based metrics, revealing no systematic bias but highlighting outliers affecting impact factor differences.

Contribution

It introduces a method to compute impact factors from NASA/ADS data and compares them with official and median-based impact factors, identifying key outliers.

Findings

No systematic bias between ADS and official impact factors.

Outliers like highly cited review papers significantly influence impact factor differences.

Maximum relative differences are due to specific highly cited papers.

Abstract

In this work, we calculate the 2025 impact factors for 16 journals in Particle Physics (and related areas such as Nuclear Physics) using citations collated by NASA/ADS (Astrophysics Data System). We then compare them to the official impact factors calculated by Clarivate. We also compare these impact factors to the median-based impact factors introduced in a previous work. We do not find any systematic bias between the ADS and official impact factors. We find the maximum relative difference between official and median-based impact factors for PTEP and Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science. For PTEP, this difference is due to one outlier, viz Particle Data Group with over 1400 citations in the last two years. Similarly for Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science, the difference is due to a review paper on Hubble tension and early dark energy with over 100 citations in the past two years. Both these papers have significantly elevated the official impact factors above its median value.