Category: impact factor

Clarivate will no longer include citations to and from retracted papers when calculating journal impact factors, the company announced today. 

The change comes after some have wondered over the years whether citations to retracted papers should count toward a journal’s impact factor, a controversial yet closely watched metric that measures how often others cite papers from that journal. For many institutions, impact factors have become a proxy for the importance of their faculty’s research.

Retractions are relatively rare and represent only 0.04% of papers indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science, according to the announcement. But the overall retraction rate has risen recently, to about 0.2%, which, along with a decrease in the time it takes to retract papers, motivated the policy change. Nandita Quaderi, the editor-in-chief of Web of Science, said in the announcement the policy would “pre-emptively guard against any such time that citations to and from retracted content could contribute to widespread distortions in the [journal impact factor].”