Increasing the between-year stability of the impact factor in the Science Citation Index

Abstract

The critical evaluation of scientific productivity during last years hasbeen done with the help of the Journal Citation Reports ranks ofjournals. The relative performance of each journal was derived from asimple calculation called Impact Factor. Such measure has been widelycriticized by scientometricians, but alternative proposals were neveradopted due perhaps to their complexity, but also to economiclimitations. For the informetric purposes this situation has led to aworrying lack of standardization and, worst of all, makes useless manystudies for comparative purposes. In order to enhance the comparativevalue of the impact factor we develop a new easy method that increasesthe time period used for its calculation. Such new index has advantagesover the old one.