Journals’ Impact Factors Say A Lot
1/1/2016
A journal’s rate of citations is a viable indicator of its credibility. One way to assess this is to check a publication’s Science Citation Index Impact Factor (IF), which measures the average citations to articles published in scientific and social science journals. It also measures how quickly articles are cited.
Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information, is credited with devising the IF, which is calculated annually for publications indexed in Thomson Reuters’ “Journal Citation Reports.”
The IF of a journal is the average number of citations to those papers published during the two preceding years.
Among the leading journals in the IF’s gerontology/geriatrics category are
Aging Cell, Neurobiology of Aging, Age, Ageing Research Reviews, Mechanisms of Ageing and Development, Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, and
Experimental Gerontology. For the full list, go to
http://archive.sciencewatch.com/dr/sci/11/feb27-11_1/.