Journal Impact Revisited

Abstract

It has been three years since we first attempted to estimate the impact of our start-up journal International Journal of Internet Science (Reips & Matzat, 2008). Impact figures for start-up journals are still hard to get from the organizations that have been collecting journal data - an astounding lack in times of Internet Science, when it has become possible and common to retrieve and deliver bibliographic information from massive databases within seconds. Alas, there is one success story: A few weeks ago, Google started "Google Scholar Citations". It is geared towards authors, but the system is forgiving, so we could create a personality for our journal at http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=OCYy1o4AAAAJ. Here it becomes immediately visible that the International Journal of Internet Science has an h factor of 8, meaning that eight of its 22 articles have been cited for at least eight times (not counting editorials and book reviews). Also, it becomes visible that all of the citations that lead to this h factor happened during the last five years. Google Scholar Citations further provides an "i10" metric of 5 for the IJIS, meaning that 5 of its 22 articles have been cited at least ten times.