Introducing sub-impact factor (SIF-) sequences and an aggregated SIF-indicator for journal ranking

The main methods for ranking academic journals are peer review based approaches and applications of various bibliometric indicators, or a mixture of the two. Such rankings are used to assess the overall quality of journals, although their real meaning remains unclear as long as the notion of “quality’ is not precisely defined. In our approach we examine journal evaluation from the perspective of knowledge accumulation taking the citation distribution into account. A new indicator, the sub-impact factor denoted as SIF, derived sub-impact factor sequences and an aggregated SIF-indicator are proposed. An empirical study is performed on 64 journals in the area of operations research and management science, illustrating the use of these indicators.