Measuring the excellence contribution at the journal level: An alternative to Garfield’s impact factor

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyze to which extent the JIF reflects the amount of excellent publications contained in a journal in the corresponding subject category. Therefore, we are introducing two percentile-based indicators in order to measure the excellence contribution at journal level. Calculations of these indicators have been carried out for five different JCR subject categories to investigate the correlation with Garfield’s Journal Impact Factor. Differences in the ranking according to all three indicators especially in Quartile 1 of each category are shown and discussed. We have also studied the effect of multidisciplinary journals to the excellence contribution at category level and observed considerable differences between the five categories. In the hard sciences, their omission would lead to neglect a large part of excellent publications. Furthermore, our results hint to the fact that the introduced excellence indicators are very robust considering the types of documents considered for their calculation. This pilot study shows that the introduction of journal excellence indicators will provide a complete and more accurate picture of the citation impact of a journal than the JIF, because they are informing directly about the total and normalized excellence contribution of each journal to the corresponding subject category