1Department of Library and Information Science, Mangalore University, Mangalagangothri, Mangalore-574 199 E-mail: khaisarmk@yahoo.com.
2ICFAI Business School, Bangalore-560 062 E-mail: pradeepvenoor@yahoo.com.
The paper gives the background, meaning and the criteria of the impact factor explaining their terminologies and calculations with examples. It discusses its advantages and the associated problems, and states on the possible misuse and manipulation of the impact factor. The paper concludes with a caution not to finally rely on the impact factor as the only valid measure to rank journal quality and productivity.
Impact factor, citation analysis, librametrics, bibliometrics, informetrics, immediacy index, citation index, quality measures
