Tag: citation metrics

First Journal Impact Factor for Frontiers of Biogeography

Led by Editor-in-Chief Prof. Robert J. Whittaker, Frontiers of Biogeography aims to advance public understanding of biogeographical sciences.

Frontiers of Biogeography, the official journal of The International Biogeography Society (TIBS), has received its first Journal Impact Factor (JIF) from Clarivate’s Web of Science. Its 2024 JIF stands at 2.5, highlighting the journal’s impact and relevance to the academic community.

Logo featuring "First Impact Factor" alongside "Frontiers of Biogeography," with Pensoft and Clarivate Web of Science branding.

This milestone places Frontiers of Biogeography in the Q2 category in both of its assigned Web of Science categories, Ecology and Geography, Physical.

A key metric released by Clarivate, the 2024 Journal Impact Factor reflects the number of times content published in a specific journal during 2022 and 2023 was cited in the subsequent 2024. This total citation count is then divided by the number of “citable” articles (i.e., research and review articles) to estimate the JIF.

Prior to this inaugural JIF, Frontiers of Biogeography had already achieved notable recognition, including a Scopus CiteScore of 5.5, an all-time high for the journal and the latest rise in an upwards trend that dates from its inclusion in Scopus back in 2016. It is placed in the 79th percentile for Ecology and the 73th percentile for Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, ranking in Q1 for both categories.

An illustration shows a woman in a green sweater holding orange blocks in front of a chart illustrating Scopus CiteScore metrics and data.

Established in 2009, Frontiers of Biogeography was recently relaunched on the ARPHA Platform, where it is co-published with Pensoft Publishers. The journal publishes studies on all geographical variations of life at all levels of organisation, adhering to rigorous academic standards and aiming to advance public understanding of biogeographical sciences. It is led by Editor-in-Chief Prof. Robert J. Whittaker and Deputy Editors-in-Chief Dr. Janet Franklin and Prof. Mark J. Costello.

The International Biogeography Society relaunches flagship journal Frontiers of Biogeography on ARPHA platform

Professor Robert J. Whittaker, Editor-in-Chief of Frontiers of Biogeography, expressed his enthusiasm for this achievement, stating, “When The International Biogeography Society launched Frontiers of Biogeography under the editorship of Joaquín Hortal in 2009, we had a vision of it becoming an adaptable, independent, society-owned journal with a distinctive place in the journal publishing landscape. The attainment of our first Clarivate Journal Impact Factor is testimony to the hard work by our past and present editors and reviewers, and to the quality and interest level of the work that our community has entrusted to the journal for publication.”

“Working together with the team at Pensoft we are confident that we can continue to grow the journal as a favoured venue for Open Access publication of cutting-edge biogeographical research,” he added.

Determinants of citation impact

Put together, formal parameters other than journal impact – such as the brevity of an article’s title – turned out to be stronger citation predictors.

Guest blog post by Jürgen Dengler

“What makes a paper successful?” is something authors would like to know when submitting a manuscript and editors when deciding on the acceptance of papers. 

One answer is: “Write an exciting paper on a relevant topic with up-to-date methods”. 

While this is certainly true, most authors feel that this is not the whole truth. The enormous efforts some authors invest in getting their paper accepted in a “high-rank” journal reflect the belief that the publication venue influences the scientific impact of a paper. Other authors spend quite some time in finding a “fancy” title for their contribution.

But do such “formal” aspects actually influence the impact of articles and, if so, to which degree and which are the most relevant ones? 

Astonishingly, there is very little published evidence on these aspects. 

Thus, I conducted an empirical study using my own publication output over the years. With almost 200 papers in over 50 indexed journals, it already allows some generalisations. With the three IAVS journals, Journal of Vegetation Science, Applied Vegetation Science and Vegetation Classification and Survey, being among the preferred outlets, the journal portfolio is probably also quite similar to that of other IAVS members. 

As a common currency for citation impact, I used the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), provided by the Scopus database. While the absolute number of citations is not suitable for a meaningful comparison between papers as the number of citations always increases with time since publication, FWCI standardised citations compared to all articles published in the same year in the same subject field and as the same article type (e.g. research article vs. review article). 

A FWCI of 1 means that an article is cited as much as the average, a FWCI of 2 refers to twice as many citations as an average article, etc. Scopus also provides a corresponding measure to FWCI at the journal level, namely the Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), which essentially is the mean of the FWCI values of all papers in that journal in the respective period.

According to the multiple regression analysis, journal impact (SNIP) was the strongest predictor of the article impact. 

However, alone it explained only 26.8% of the variance while other formal parameters together explained 31.5% of the variance. 

Among those, the brevity of the title was most influential. Each word less in the title led to 9% more citations. 

Further, both article length and author number had a positive influence on citations.

Publishing in a special feature increased the citation rate by 43%. 

By contrast, open access or formulating titles as questions or factual statements did not significantly influence citation rates.

In conclusion, selecting a high-impact journal has less influence on the article impact than many people believe – the citation impact of different articles in one journal typically varies more than the mean citation impact between different journals.

For authors, the easiest way to increase the impact of a given article is to shorten the title as much as possible. 

Caption: Variation of the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) values of articles in journals represented by at least five articles in the analysed sample, with box height proportional to the number of included papers. All three IAVS journals were well represented. The variation of citation impact within individual journals was very large (note the log-scale of the x-axis). For example, the best cited articles of the author in JVS, AVS and VCS all had a considerably better citation performance than the single Nature paper co-authored by the author (FWCI = 3.70).

Associated journal article:

Dengler J (2024) Determinants of citation impact. Vegetation Classification and Survey 5: 169-177. https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.126956.

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Originally published on the Vegetation Science Blog: Official blog post of the IAVS journals.

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