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Introducing the Current Contribution Index for characterizing the recent, relevant impact of journals

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Abstract

The Garfield (Impact) Factor characterizes the measure of the up to date specific contribution of scientific journals to the total impact of the journals in a special field. A new indicator (Current Contribution Index, CCI) was introduced in order to characterize the relative contribution of journals to recent, relevant knowledge of a corresponding field. The CC Index relates the number of citations received by a journal in a given year to the total number of citations obtained by all journals of the corresponding field in that year. Mean Garfield Factors and mean Current Contribution Indexes were calculated for some fields and several journals. No significant correlation was found between the Garfield Factor (GF) and Current Contribution Index (CCI) of journals. The ratios of the GF to CCI referring to the corresponding top 10, 20 or 50 per cent of the journals ranked by decreasing GF and CCI, strongly differ by field.

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Correspondence to Péter Vinkler.

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Vinkler, P. Introducing the Current Contribution Index for characterizing the recent, relevant impact of journals. Scientometrics 79, 409–420 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-009-0427-x

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