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A research work when compiled in the form of a paper, then its output is judged by two parameters. One is the impact factor and the second is the h-index of the journal.

In this post, we will discuss first the Impact Factor then H-index. So you can get the idea and purpose of the post. 

Journal Impact Factor

This is also very interesting, the impact factor was devised to evaluate the journals, quality, and research impact of the papers published in that journal. But today the picture has been changed totally, now it is a criterion to judge the research paper. Whether the individual research paper in a good impact factor journal receives any citation or not. 

How to calculate the Impact Factor? 

Nowadays Clarivate analyzes the Impact Factors of the journals and published them every year in the Journal Citation Report (JCR). Eugene Eli Garfield was the person who founded it for the evaluation of the journals. Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was a company that was helping in bibliometric and scientometric studies of the research & journals. Garfield was the owner of this company (ISI).

The first-time impact factor was used in the year 1975 to evaluate the journal. Merely purpose was to help the academic and research institutions to provide high-quality research journals. 

So, the library and ultimately Librarian were on the target for this business information (bibliometric and scientometric studies). They were supposed to train for this business and to filter out good-quality journals for the institutions. By the way, my purpose is to tell you about the Impact Factor of the journal. So let us define the process;

Suppose you want to calculate the Impact Factor of any journal for the year 2020. Then you have to count all citations received by the papers that were published in the year 2018-19. Again, now you have to count all the papers that were published in the year 2018 and 2019, total all of these.

Let us suppose total citations received 225 in the year 2020 by the papers that were published into the year 2019 and 2018. While in the year 2019 paper published 56 whereas in the year 2018 there were 68. So total papers published (68+56= 124). Now the impact factor of the journal for the year 2020 will be = 225/124=  1.81

How you can manipulate the Impact Factor?

Bad practices may happen anywhere if it is related to the unethical expansion of the business. So, what are the points where one can see the unethical practices?

1. Number of citations
2. Self-citations ( a separate impact factor is being calculated with or without self-citations, but Journals don’t display that, in general)
3. Source of citations (are all regular research articles, or editor notes, book reviews, or something else)
4. Suddenly drop the number of paper publications
5. Suggestions by the editor/reviewers to include some research articles, etc.  
6. Variations in the different disciplines Journal Impact Factors (you can not compare the social science journals impact factor with the physical sciences or medical sciences or vice versa).

So there are some major points about taking the impact factor. One major question comes that journals usually display 2 yrs or 5 yrs impact factors, but what about that paper that was published 6 yrs ago or earlier? How that is contributing to the specific domain of research, still now? What will be the impact of that research?

How to calculate H-Index?

Now the questions which were left by the observation of the impact factor resolved by the H-index. You can calculate the H-index of the individual research scholar or anybody that is involved with the research, like your institution or the journal itself.  

So, in this section, we will get the information of an individual h-index and reasonable answer that was left in the impact factors discussion.

Again h-indexed based on the citations of the research articles published by the researcher (or an affiliated institution or Journal itself) irrespective of the self-citations considerations. 

Let us consider a RESEARCHER “X” that publishing research papers in the journals from where one can extract the citations information. Remember if your article is published without DOI one can’t extract the information of your metadata and citation information from the concerned journal. So much data obviously will miss here, and please don’t consider Google Scholar for the citations and H-Index calculations, if this is in your mind, Why?.

Read Also: Route of a Research Manuscript for the Search Engines

Because people most of the time keep it on auto mode and it shows wrong information. Also, I accept that only Google Scholar indexed articles appear on it. Provided the author filled the complete information.  

But if you are providing your metadata to the CrossRef for the DOI purposes then the data harvester can extract all the relevant information from there. 

Example of RESEARCHER -X

This is an example of a researcher, that published 9 research papers and their citations. In the year 2010, he published 2 papers. But we are counting the papers and their citations irrespective of the year, that is why I had taken this example.

So now how to determine the h-index of this researcher, for it, we have to write the citations in descending order to the publication number, not to the concerned paper that was published in the particular year. So I will make only a two-column table. In which I will count the paper citations order and publication number.

From this example, you can see that the researcher “X” published 9 articles and some articles got citations into the two digits, still, the h-index is 8. Why not 10, you can ask? Because 9th papers have only 8 citations if the 9th paper received at least 9 citations then the h-index will be 9 but not more than 9, why? Because he published only 9 papers.

So, into the h-index calculations, one can see the role of 6 yrs old paper or more than that. It was a drawback of the Impact factor that was included by the J. E. Hirsch, in H-index calculations. In a similar way, you can calculate the H-index of any institution or a journal.

From this analysis, you had observed that the impact factor was only to analyze the research journals for the library of an institution but becomes the parameter to judge the research articles. So, in the next section, we will see who challenges these impact factor and h-index calculations and how are they resolving the issue?

San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)

What is DORA and why do they ask to reassess the way of the present research with a new model? How it will help the researchers and a research institution? San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) group was established in the year 2012, you can say. Because this year the people (researchers, editors, publishers sit together ) who were facing the problem to assess research by some parameters, actually were interested to look at a new possibility to evaluate the research outcome genuinely. 

Being a researcher it is must you visit their website and read all about their objectives, mission, and many things especially the case studies of various research institutions.  These case studies will help you in many ways to think and to implement the ideas at your own institutions. 

Conclusion

I have presented basic ideas about the Impact factor and h-index parameters and you can get an idea from it that what was the purpose behind these. How H-index overcome the impact factor issue and what else remains questionable?

Disclaimer: This article is just for the awareness of young researchers and readers. Not to harm the reputations of any concerned or mislead the purpose. If there is any objection at any point please contact and I will try to resolve the issue.