The distribution of citations in the context of Journal Impact Factor
February 13, 2014
Nature editor Noah Gray Twittered a link to a 2003 Editorial in Nature Neuroscience.
The key takeaway is in the figure (which Noah also twittered).
In 2003 the JIF for Nature Neuroscience was 15.14, for J Neuro 8.05 and for Brain Research 2.474. Nature itself was 30.98.
Plenty of people refer to the skew and the relative influence of a handful of very highly cited papers but it is interesting and more memorable to see in graphical form, isn’t it?
DrugMonkey 
February 13, 2014 at 11:18 am
it would make more sense to plot it in a cumulative format instead
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February 15, 2014 at 5:10 am
So, in a nutshell, if you want to estimate the impact of a paper from the journal it’s published in, the worst estimator you could pick is the arithmetic mean of the impact of previously published papers.
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February 15, 2014 at 7:13 am
But even if you measure the median, the relative “rating” of the journals remains.
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February 15, 2014 at 7:14 am
So even if you use the median, the relative rating of the journals stilll stands.
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