Modifying the journal impact factor by fractional citation weighting: The audience factor

A new approach to the field normalization of the classical journal impact factor is introduced called the audience factor. This approach takes into consideration the citing propensity of journals for a given cited journal, specifically the mean number of references of each citing journal, and fractionally weights the citations from those citing journals. Hence, the audience factor is a variant of a fractional citation counting scheme, but computed on the citing journal rather than citing article or disciplinary level, and in contrast to other cited-side normalization strategies is focused on the behaviour of the citing entities. A comparison with standard journal impact factors from Thomson Reuters shows a more diverse representation of fields within various quintiles of impact, significant movement in rankings for a number of individual journals, but nevertheless a high overall correlation with standard impact factors.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: JASIS
• Authors: Michel Zitt, Henry Small
• Keywords: Audience Factor, Classical Journal Impact, JASIS 2008, Journal Impact Factors