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Emerging alternatives to the impact factor

Marcus A. Banks (Education and Information Services, San Francisco Library, University of California, San Francisco, California, USA)
Robert Dellavalle (Dermatology Services, Denver Veterans Administration Medical Center, Denver, Colorado, USA)

OCLC Systems & Services: International digital library perspectives

ISSN: 1065-075X

Article publication date: 22 August 2008

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Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to document the proliferating range of alternatives to the impact factor that have arisen within the past five years, coincident with the increased prominence of open access publishing.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper offers an overview of the history of the impact factor as: a measure for scholarly merit; a summary of frequent criticisms of the impact factor's calculation and usage; and a framework for understanding some of the leading alternatives to the impact factor.

Findings

This paper identifies five categories of alternatives to the impact factor: measures that build upon the same data that informs the impact factor; measures that refine impact factor data with “page rank” indices that weight electronic resources or web sites through the number of resources that link to them; measures of article downloads and other usage factors; recommender systems, in which individual scholars rate the value of articles and a group's evaluations pool together collectively; and ambitious measures that attempt to encompass the interactions and influence of all inputs in the scholarly communications system.

Originality/value

Librarians can utilize the measures described in this paper to support more robust collection development than is possible through reliance on the impact factor alone.

Keywords

Citation

Banks, M.A. and Dellavalle, R. (2008), "Emerging alternatives to the impact factor", OCLC Systems & Services: International digital library perspectives, Vol. 24 No. 3, pp. 167-173. https://doi.org/10.1108/10650750810898200

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2008, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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