Beyond the Journal Impact Factor: a new approach to characterize the visibility of journals and articles based on percentiles

The use of the Journal Impact Factor as an indicator of the quality of individual articles and journals presents limitations. Here, we propose a new approach that combines citation distributions by percentiles, the number and proportion of uncited articles, and the number and proportion of publications below the mean citations in relation to the journal and the field as a method to measure the influence of the publications and their real visibility. We tested it with 10 journals under the Information Science and Library Science category (LIS) of the JCR whose articles were retrieved from OpenAlex for the period 2000-2020 and the results suggest that journals whose graphs present a lower proportion of articles below the mean citation in the category, a lower proportion of uncited documents, and a greater area below the diagonal are those that have more visibility, regardless of the number of publications and their age.