Comparison between Impact factor, SCImago journal rank indicator and Eigenfactor score of nuclear medicine journals

Abstract

Despite its widespread acceptance in the scientific world, impact factor (IF) has been criticized recently on many accounts: including lack of quality assessment of the citations, influence of self citation, English language bias, etc. In the current study, we evaluated three indices of journal scientific impact: (IF), Eigenfactor Score (ES), and SCImago Journal rank indicator (SJR) of nuclear medicine journals. Overall 13 nuclear medicine journals are indexed in ISI and SCOPUS and 7 in SCOPUS only. Self citations, Citations to non-English articles, citations to non-citable items and citations to review articles contribute to IFs of some journals very prominently, which can be better detected by ES and SJR to some extent. Considering all three indices while judging quality of the nuclear medicine journals would be a better strategy due to several shortcomings of IF.