How representative is the journal impact factor?

Abstract

The journal impact factor (the mean citedness of a journal's articles) is a characteristic journal property that stays relatively constant over time. However, within each journal the citedness of the individual articles form an extremely skewed distribution, regardless of journal impact. The journal impact factor is, therefore, not representative of the individual article, and cannot be used as a proxy measure of article citedness except when large (50–100 articles), random samples of articles are pooled. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.