A Novel Journal Evaluation Metric that Adjusts the Impact Factors across Different Subject Categories

During the last two decades, impact factor has been widely used as a journal evaluation metric that differentiates the influence of a specific journal compared with other journals. However, impact factor does not provide a reliable metric between journals in different subject categories. For example, higher impact factors are given to biology and general sciences than those assigned to other traditional engineering and social sciences. This study initially analyzes the trend of the time series of the impact factors of the journals listed in Journal Citation Reports during the last decade. This study then proposes new journal evaluation metrics that adjust the impact factors across different subject categories. The proposed metrics possibly provides a consistent measure to mitigate the differences in impact factors among subject categories. On the basis of experimental results, we recommend the most reliable and appropriate metric to evaluate journals that are less dependent on the characteristics of subject categories.