Impact factors and the promotion of our authors’ articles
| Author | Kyle Grayson,Martin Coward |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0263395716680223 |
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Editorial |
editorial2016
Editorial
Politics
2017, Vol. 37(1) 3 –4
Impact factors and the
© The Author(s) 2016
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promotion of our authors’
DOI: 10.1177/0263395716680223
pol.sagepub.com
articles
Martin Coward
University of Manchester, UK
Kyle Grayson
Newcastle University, UK
In June Politics received the very welcome news that its 2-year Impact Factor had
increased to 1.5. Politics is now a top quartile journal, ranked 36th out of 163 political
science journals by Thomson Reuters. Our 5-year impact factor – which measures
citability of our articles over a longer term and so is more stable – is also healthy at
1.231, ranking us at 66th, or 2nd quartile. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank our
authors, reviewers and editorial board for helping us achieve this outcome.
While we share many of the concerns that have been expressed elsewhere about impact
factors and are aware of the volatility of such metrics, we are pleased to see the journal
recording such a strong performance. In simplistic terms, impact factors record the cita-
bility of a journal’s content within the scholarly community. While there are, of course,
other measures of the significance or reach of scholarly work, impact factors record the
extent to which journal content is, on average, over a particular period of time, cited in a
subset of disciplinary journals. Put simply, a rise in impact factor means that articles pub-
lished in Politics are more likely to be cited by authors in other disciplinary journals. This
is a significant outcome for us as it is one measure of our commitment to ensure that
articles reach the greatest possible audience after publication. While we can measure our
success in reaching a wide audience in page views, downloads and altmetrics, citations
provide a measure that demonstrates an article has played a role in the construction of
another scholar’s...
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