Modifying the journal impact factor by fractional citation weighting: The audience factor

Abstract A new approach to the field normalization of the classical journal impact factor is introduced. This approach, called the audience factor, takes into consideration the citing propensity of journals for a given cited journal, specifically, the mean number of references of each citing journal, and fractionally weights the citations from those citing journals. Hence, the audience factor is a variant of a fractional citation‐counting scheme, but computed on the citing journal rather than the citing article or disciplinary level, and, in contrast to other cited‐side normalization strategies, is focused on the behavior of the citing entities. A comparison with standard journal impact factors from Thomson Reuters shows a more diverse representation of fields within various quintiles of impact, significant movement in rankings for a number of individual journals, but nevertheless a high overall correlation with standard impact factors.