https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-025-06397-8
Regular Article
A meta-analysis of impact factors of astrophysics journals
1
Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Hyderabad, 500084, Hyderabad, Telangana, India
2
Department of Physics, IIT Hyderabad, 500084, Hyderabad, Telangana, India
Received:
17
December
2024
Accepted:
4
May
2025
Published online:
24
May
2025
We calculate the 2024 impact factors for the 38 most widely used journals in Astrophysics, using the citations collated by NASA/Astrophysics Data System (ADS), and compare them to the official impact factors. This includes journals which publish papers outside of astrophysics such as PRD, EPJC, and Nature. We also propose a new metric to gauge the impact factor based on the median number of citations in a journal and calculate the same for all the journals. We find that the ADS-based impact factors are mostly in agreement, albeit higher than the official impact factors for most journals. The journals with the maximum fractional difference in median-based and old impact factors are JHEAP and PTEP. We find the maximum difference between the ADS and official impact factor for Nature.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
