impact+factor

q The **impact factor** (IF) of an [|academic journal] is a measure reflecting the average number of [|citations] to recent articles published in the journal. It is frequently used as a [|proxy] for the relative importance of a journal within its field, with journals with higher impact factors deemed to be more important than those with lower ones. The impact factor was devised by [|Eugene Garfield], the founder of the [|Institute for Scientific Information]. Impact factors are calculated yearly for those journals that are indexed in the //[|Journal Citation Reports]//. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor

What is a good impact factor? http://libanswers.mdanderson.org/a.php?qid=67547 Only about 20% of journals have an impact factor higher than 3. The very top journals like Nature and Science have impact factors around 30-40.