Quartile weighted impact factor

Evaluation of the journals has always been one of the important issues. In this regard, several indicators that take into account different factors are proposed. Currently, Impact Factor (IF) is one of the main indicators for the evaluation of journals. Although, IF is frequently used among scientometric indicators; one of its most criticized characteristics is that the prestige of the citing source is not considered. For this reason, many modified versions of IF have been proposed by several researchers. IF that considers both individual and group (quartile) weights of the citing sources are proposed in the article. Prestige stands for the quartile where the citing source is indexed in Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. For comparison of the proposed weighted IF with the original IF, experiments are conducted on 20 journals randomly picked from WoS which are also indexed in Scopus. Pearson rank correlation coefficient was used as the comparison criterion. The results of the experiment demonstrate that consideration of the quartile weights of the citing source lead to the decrease of correlation between the original IF and the proposed weighted IF. Decreasing of the correlation will be felt more evidently when experiments are conducted on more journals.