Abstract:
Journals are routinely evaluated by journal impact factors. However, more
controversially, these same impact factors are often used to evaluate authors and groups as
well. A more meaningful approach will be to use actual citation rates. Since in each journal
there is a very highly skewed distribution of articles according to citation rates, there is
little correlation between journal impact factor and actual citation rate of articles from
individual scientists or research groups. Simply stated, journal impact factor does not
successfully predict high citations in future. In this paper, we propose the use of Peirce’s
measure of predictive success (Peirce in Science 4(93):453–454, 1884) to see if the use of
journal impact factors to predict high citation rates is acceptable or not. It is seen that this
measure is independent of Pearson’s correlation (Seglen 1997) and gives a more quantitative
refinement of the Type I and Type II classification of Smith (Financ Manag 133–149,
2004). The measures are used to examine the portfolios of some active scientists. It is clear
that the journal impact factor is not effective in predicting future citations of successful
authors.
