Editorial Cite This: ACS Catal. 2019, 9, 7616−7617
pubs.acs.org/acscatalysis
The 2018 Journal Impact Factor for ACS Catalysis • Essentially all journals exhibit a citation distribution in their JCR analysis, whereby a small fraction of articles garner a disproportionate fraction of citations. Figure 1 shows the distribution of 2018 citations of ACS Catalysis papers published in 2016−2017, alongside the distribution for another catalysis title as an example. As noted in the plots, reviews typically draw more citations than regular research articles. For the two journals shown in Figure 1, and for most journals overall, the overall citation/article median (50th percentile articles) is less than the JIF, whereas the review median is greater than the JIF. In the side-by-side comparison shown here, ACS Catalysis has a higher JIF, and a higher median citations/ paper for articles and reviews, than the other catalysis title. ACS Catalysis also has a significant number of very highly cited articles (>50 citations), while the other title does not. ACS Catalysis has its peak in the citation distribution at six citations, whereas the second title has its peak at three citations. Approximately 2% of articles in the dataset
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he 2018 Clarivate Analytics journal impact factor (JIF) was released in June, rising from 11.384 to 12.221 for ACS Catalysis. While this single number represents a specific calculation (the number of citations in 2018 relative to the number of articles published in 2016−2017), many chemists and engineers continue to place undue emphasis on the JIF value in evaluating where they should publish their work. The JIF was intended to be a measure of the average citation impact of a journal, relative to peer journals publishing a similar scope of scientific content, as outlined in a recent editorial by Kamat.1 Other interpretations of the meaning of the JIF should be approached with caution, as noted in that and numerous other publications.2,3 Key messages outlined by Kamat include (underlined points below):1 • The JIF provides a metric to gauge the average impact of the journal, but it cannot convey the impact of individual articles. An article published in a JIF 10 journal is not necessarily more scientifically sound or impactful than an article published in a JIF 5 journal.
Figure 1. Distributions of citations to papers comprising the 2018 JIF calculation for ACS Catalysis (top) and another catalysis journal (bottom), taken from Clarivate Analytics Journal Citations Reports Database (July 21, 2019). Published: August 2, 2019 © 2019 American Chemical Society
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DOI: 10.1021/acscatal.9b03106 ACS Catal. 2019, 9, 7616−7617
ACS Catalysis
Editorial
Notes
are uncited for ACS Catalysis, and ∼3% for the second title. Nonetheless, these direct comparisons are clouded by the fact that the two titles, while both covering catalysis, do not publish the same scope of papers, as further discussed below. • The JIF is strongly impacted by the popularity of the field and number of researchers engaged in that topic. As highlighted by Kamat,1 “journals that publish energy and materials related content have seen a significant rise in JIF in recent years. This topic-dependent citation impact points out the ambiguity of comparing the numerical value of JIF while evaluating journals across different disciplines.” To this end, although journals with related titles might be expected to publish similar content, the types of articles published in seemingly comparable titles can vary. At ACS Catalysis, we benchmark ourselves against other medium or large comprehensive catalysis journals that publish on topics across the full array of catalysis subdiscplines: biocatalysis/enzymology, heterogeneous catalysis, and homogeneous catalysis. As a secondary field of titles, we also consider medium or large, broad, comprehensive chemistry journals such as the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, or Chemical Science, as these titles also publish research articles across the full array of catalysis subdisciplines as a (sometimes significant) fraction of their content. • Noting that the popularity of certain fields can drive citations and boost JIFs, it can be tempting for journals or editors to pursue submissions on certain topics. As highlighted by Kamat,1 submissions on perovskites, electrochemistry, quantum dots, or water splitting could boost the JIF of an energy journal. Similarly, popular topics in catalysis such as photocatalysis and electrocatalysis can lead to higher citations. As a matter of policy, ACS Catalysis has not narrowed its focus to specific topics in the last several years; instead, we react to the submissions of the community to help guide the scope of topics published. Indeed, we add editorial expertise to the team to match the demand of the market, which are the submissions of our authors. Aside from targeting a specific fraction of reviews and perspectives in our annual published output and emphasizing fundamental rather than applied aspects of catalysis, publications in ACS Catalysis in recent years simply manifest the fraction of submissions across all areas of catalysis that are deemed consistent with the top 10% of papers in catalysis, as judged by our referees and editors. In summary, we appreciate that the ACS Catalysis JIF continues to rise, while noting that the impact factor is just one of many measures of journal impact. In parallel, we also caution against the overutilization of JIF in assessing the quality or impact of individual articles published within a specific journal, especially in the assessment of individual researchers and their research contributions.
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
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REFERENCES
(1) Kamat, P. V. Dissecting the 2018 Journal Impact Factor. ACS Energy Lett. 2019, 4, 1791−1792. (2) Larivière, V.; Kiermer, V.; MacCallum, C. J.; McNutt, M.; Patterson, M.; Pulverer, B.; Swaminathan, S.; Taylor, S.; Curry, S.. A simple proposal for the publication of journal citation distributions. bioRxiv, DOI: 10.1101/062109. (3) Zupanc, G. K. H. Impact beyond the impact factor. J. Comp. Physiol., A 2014, 200, 113.
Christopher W. Jones, Editor-in-Chief
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Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
AUTHOR INFORMATION
ORCID
Christopher W. Jones: 0000-0003-3255-5791 7617
DOI: 10.1021/acscatal.9b03106 ACS Catal. 2019, 9, 7616−7617
