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Validity of Basing Authors' Publication Strategy on Journal Impact Factors

Stasa Milojevic,F. Radicchi,J. Bar-Ilan

Published 2016 in arXiv.org

ABSTRACT

Choosing the best scientific venue for the submission of a manuscript, with the aim of maximizing the impact of the future publication, is a frequent task faced by scholars. In this paper, we show that the Impact Factor (IF) of a journal allows to rationally achieve this goal. We take advantage of a comprehensive bibliographic and citation dataset of about 2.5 million articles from 16,000 journals, and demonstrate that the probability of receiving more citations in one journal compared to another is a universal function of the IF values of the two journals. The relation is well described by a modified logistic function, and provides an easy-to-use rule to guide a publication strategy. The benefit of publishing in a journal with a higher IF value, instead of another with a lower one grows slowly as a function of the ratio of their IF values. For example, receiving more citations is granted in 90\% of the cases only if the IF ratio is greater than $\sim$6, while targeting a journal with an IF 2$\times$ higher than another brings in marginal citation benefit.

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2016

  • Venue

    arXiv.org

  • Publication date

    2016-07-11

  • Fields of study

    Physics, Computer Science

  • Identifiers
    arXiv 1607.03179
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

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CLAIMS

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REFERENCES

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