verspagen.nl - Impact Factors in economics

Impact Factors are a big thing in researcher evaluation nowadays. Publishing in journals with a high impact factor is seen as an indication of quality. But some journals do not have an impact factor. Does this mean these are bad journals? It doesn't. Here is a broader list of impact factors in economics than the one that is supplied by Web of Science.

The problem is that the Web of Science has only a limited list of journals that are included in the calculation of the impact factor. And whether or not a journal is included in that list is more an issue of historical coincidence than of any matter related to journal quality. The Scopus database provides a wider base to calculate impact factors. I calculated them for a set of 266 journals, i.e., 70 more than what is available in the Web of Science. For the 196 journals for which I have impact factors from 2 sources, there is a high correlation between those 2 sources. And for the 70 journals for which we previously had no impact factors, there are quite a few with reasonably high values. Download the pdf that includes the full list of results and a brief explanation.