PeerJ–A PLOS ONE Contender in 2015? | The Scholarly Kitchen

"PeerJ is entering its fourth year of operation, which may not sound like a long time for a new publisher, but in the world of start-ups, four years is often when its founders begin to seriously evaluate their future. In my last post, I reported that PeerJ was growing, publishing more papers and attracting more authors, although it was not clear whether the company was moving toward financial stability. In a crowded market of multidisciplinary open access journals, I argued that the success (or failure) of PeerJ would be determined when it received its first Impact Factor, which will be announced in mid-June with the publication of Thomson Reuters’ Journal Citation Report. The purpose of this post is to estimate PeerJ‘s first Impact Factor and discuss its implications. As of this writing, PeerJ has not been indexed in the Web of Science‘s Core Collection–the dataset from which the Journal Citation Report (and the Impact Factor) are derived. However, it is still possible to estimate PeerJ‘s first Impact Factor by searching the references of other papers indexed in the Core Collection. This called a Cited Reference Search, and it is one of those amazingly powerful tools that is largely overlooked by most Web of Science users. For publishers, cited reference searches can reveal how authors cite your journals, and how sloppy and error-prone some authors can be ... So how is PeerJ going to perform? If we include 402 citations in the numerator and 231 citable items in the denominator, we arrive at a base score of 1.740. This figure doesn’t include self-citations (citations from PeerJ in 2014 citing other PeerJ articles published in 2013), since PeerJ articles are not yet indexed in the Web of Science. While self-citation rates can be particularly high in specialist journals for which there are few other journals publishing articles on the same topic, multidisciplinary biomedical journals generally have low self-citation rates. For PLOS ONE, self-citation rates affecting their Impact Factor calculation range from 8% to 14%. If PeerJ is comparable, we are looking at a first Impact Factor between 1.879 and 1.984.  How does this compare to PLOS ONE?  ..."