Weighted Impact Factor (WIF) for assessing the quality of scientific journals

Nowadays impact factor is the significant indicator for journal evaluation. In impact factor calculation is used number of all citations to journal, regardless of the prestige of cited journals, however, scientific units (paper, researcher, journal or scientific organization) cited by journals with high impact factor or researchers with high Hirsch index are more important than objects cited by journals without impact factor or unknown researcher. In this paper was offered weighted impact factor for getting more accurate rankings for journals, which consider not only quantity of citations, but also quality of citing journals. Correlation coefficients among different indicators for journal evaluation: impact factors by Thomson Scientific, weighted impact factors offered by different researchers, average and medians of all citing journals impact factors and 5-year impact factors were analysed.

💡 Research Summary

The paper addresses a fundamental limitation of the widely used journal metric Impact Factor (IF), namely that it treats every citation equally regardless of the prestige or influence of the citing source. While IF captures the quantity of citations received by a journal in a given two‑year window, it ignores “citation quality”—the idea that a citation from a high‑impact journal or a highly cited researcher should carry more weight than a citation from an obscure outlet. To remedy this, the authors propose a Weighted Impact Factor (WIF) that incorporates the impact of the citing journals into the calculation.

Definition of WIF
For a target journal, each incoming citation (C_i) is multiplied by a weight (w_i) that reflects the citation source’s standing. The weight can be the source journal’s current two‑year IF, its five‑year IF, the average IF of all citing journals, or the median IF of those journals. The WIF is then computed as:
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