The “Impact Factor” Revisited
In an article in Biomedical Digital Libraries (December 2005), authors Peng Dong, Marie Loh, and Adrian Mondry demonstrate that online availability of articles greatly influences the impact factor. They studied document sets that included some online articles and some not available online. They learned that impact factors were increased for journals whose text was freely available online. They expect that this effect will increase as more powerful search engines penetrate deeper into the scholarly world and allow researchers to find relevant articles in an instant.
Biomedical Digital Libraries, Dec 5, 2005, http://www.bio-diglib.com/content/2/1/7
