Impact Factor (IF):
This index is also known by other titles such as Journal Influence, Citation Rate, and Impact. This index was initially only for managing journals and as an index to enter the collection in the Current Contents list and was designed by Garfield so that journals that have high credibility are indexed in this collection, not to measure the credibility of all published works. research and their creators. Today, this index is used in various cases such as ranking and evaluating countries, universities and scientists. One of the reasons for the popularity of this index is the easy availability of the data required for the relevant calculations.
The term impact factor was first used to quantify publications in the 1963 edition of the science citation index. The influence coefficient of journals is considered as a scale and criterion of frequency and abundance, and it is used to determine the average of referenced articles in a journal during a certain period. Of course, a two-year period is usually considered for review, since experience has shown that about 20 percent of all references cite publications from the previous two years, so Garfield considers the two-year period as an acceptable basis for size. considered the reference rate of publications.