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Here is  a follow-up to my notes about two year Journal Impact Factors (JIFs) and our journals. I got into this because I'm working with John Cotton and another colleague on a paper on IS journals and as in our Entrepreneurship journals one I'm the numbers person. Knowing the new JIFs are out I took a look and was surprised by a few things, as noted in my first post: the very high JIF for the International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal (IEMJ) and the jump for a couple others including Management Decision (MD).

Because JIFs are means and the distributions of citations are highly skewed the citation counts are strongly affected by the highly cited articles. Therefore, looking at the highly cited articles in IEJM one will immediately be struck by the number of citations by MD. I hadn't noticed the other journal that cites it a lot: Service Industries Journal (SIJ), because it didn't have a notable jump in the 2012 JIFs; in fact it fell. Here are the two year JIFs by year:

Naturally this leads to the question of the extent of cross-citations. Here is what I see, looking at the five most cited articles (according to Web of Science), with six for MD due to a tie. I used the two years prior to the highest (or only) JIF, as these are the citation years with that effect:

What we see here is that the strongest pattern of cross-citation was between SIJ and IEMJ. For example, of the 146 citations to the five most cited articles in IEMJ affecting the 2012 JIF, over 70% of them were from either MD or SIJ. As I noted, it doesn't take a microscope to see this. For example, in one striking case, a book review about Advances in Mergers and Acquisitions, appearing in MD (49(8), 1395-1400), cited 19 articles from SIJ.

As our paper on the Entrepreneurship journals argues, citations can be a good objective measure of at one way of looking at the extent to which our writings actually matter. But we also argue that multiple measures, and human judgments are needed.