PeerJ receives its first (partial) Impact Factor | PeerJ Blog

"PeerJ received its first Impact Factor last week (which is a ‘partial‘ Impact Factor, and came in at 2.1). We know that being listed in the Web of Science and receiving an Impact Factor is very important for many stakeholders, and so this represents another milestone in our short history (having started our publication program in February 2013). From over 2,000 articles and preprints published to over 2 million article views and downloads, PeerJ is growing from strength to strength. For those not familiar with this metric, the 2014 Impact Factor is the number of citations in 2014 to articles published in 2012 and 2013 divided by the number of articles published in 2012 and 2013. Our very first Impact Factor is classed as partial because PeerJ only started publishing part way through the normal evaluation ‘window’ (of 2012-2013) and so our articles have not yet had the full time period in which to accrue citations. In other words because PeerJ only began publishing articles just over two years ago our first Impact Factor is drawn from the citation data of only 10.5 months of published articles rather than the standard 24 months. The diagram below shows exactly how much data is covered in our first Impact Factor versus the 2015 Impact Factor we are due to receive next year. We feel it is important to make this distinction in order for our existing and potential authors to see the true article data behind these citation numbers ..."