Impact factor does not predict long-term article impact across 15 journals

Abstract

Academic journals are ranked using a variety of methods with the most common metric being ‘journal impact factor’. Authors who publish in journals with higher impact factors are deemed to contribute more to their discipline. However, the impact factor of a journal does not indicate how long a specific article stays in the scientific discourse, and metrics that measure the length of time articles within a journal continue to be cited are not typically used. We examined citations of 443,732 research articles [786,064 total] between 1980 and 2020 across 15 journals. We explored the range of longevity values found across different journals as well as the relationship between impact factor and longevity. We found no relationship between impact factor and longevity, indicating that immediate attention to an article is not correlated with longer-term impact. In the set of journals that we examined, articles published in some journals (e.g., Ecology, Genetics) continued to be cited at a steady rate long beyond their initial publication date. This slow but steady citation accumulation resulted in the total citations in these journals approaching those of higher impact journals (e.g., Science, Nature) within the length of a typical academic career (30–40 years).