THE STRUCTURE OF IMPACT FACTOR OF ACADEMIC JOURNALS IN THE FIELD OF EDUCATION AND EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY: CITATIONS COMING FROM ARTICLES PUBLISHED BY THEIR EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

摘要

The impact factor introduced by Eugene Garfield is a fundamental citation-based measure for significance and performance of scientific journals. The goal of this work is to develop a new approach to study the structure of the impact factor of academic journals. The numerator in the equation of impact factor is a set of citations. We will distinguish between a) citations coming from articles in which at least one of the authors is an editorial board member of the journal cited and b) citations coming from papers with authors not related with the journal. We selected 44 journals listed in the groups "Education and Educational Research" and "Psychology, Educational" in the Social Science Citation Index. We studied the 2001 impact factor. For each journal, we obtained the names and affiliations of editorial board members. We used the printed version of journals because names and affiliations of editorial board members are usually published in the cover of every issue of academic journals. We contrasted the names and affiliations of authors of citing documents with the names and affiliations of editorial board members of the journals.