What is an Impact Factor?

Journal Impact Factor is from Journal Citation Report, a product of Thomson ISI (Institute for Scientific Information). JCR provides quantitative tools for ranking, evaluating, categorizing, and comparing journals. The Impact Factor is a measure of the frequency with which the "average article" in a journal has been cited in a particular year or period.

Many universities are requesting/expecting faculty to report Impact Factors with their applications for Promotion and Tenure. The Connexions Project and the IJELP are sensitive to this request and have developed a process of their own for the reporting of an Impact Factor.

What about Impact Factors of an author's individual contribution?

Though we agree with the importance of a Journal's Impact Factor, the NCPEA Connexions Editorial Board suggests that more important is the impact an individual author's work has on their field and the world. NCPEA and the NCPEA Connexions Editorial Board introduce a new concept and definition of Impact Factor: a quantitative measure of how often an individual author's contribution is read or viewed over an extended period of time. We suggest this measurement is related to several factors, including the (1) exposure to libraries, (2) number of readers or views, and (3) the width and breadth of a contribution's exposure (i.e., state, national, or international).

How does an individual Connexion's author access an Impact Factor?

First of all, we state that the Rice University Connexions and the NCPEA Connexions Project surpasses a particular journal's impact factor due to Connexions world-wide open access (free to the world) and multiple language exposure. Rice University Connexions has already thought of this and provides an easy tracking of such an Impact Factor. Through the Rice CNX site, anyone can access the statistics related to the number of views a particular author or module receives both from the time of publication and from a weekly record.

Here are the steps for such access along with a printout of an individual author's Impact Factor.

1. Log on to the Connexions site at: http://www.cnx.org/
2. From the opening screen (you do not log in to individual user accounts) note Find Content and then Browse Content by Author.
3. This opens a screen with an alphabetical list of all Connexions authors. Click on the first letter of the author's last name (e.g., S for Smith). 
4. Click on the author's name.
5. From the resulting screen, select Author Profile.
6. On the Author's Profile page, click on Statistics next to the author's number of modules.

Here is an example of the result:

The above authors (Irby, B., Lara, R., Hoyle, J., & Lunenburg, F.)) have two published modules in Connexions with each receiving over 1,300 views since the modules' publication date, with average views of 3+ per day. The percentile and rank are based on the total number of modules in the Connexions Content Commons, currently over 8,000 (all fields of education).

If an author wants to see the most current week's views, he/she clicks on Recent (in this case, 6/9 - 6/16. Statistics are updated on a weekly basis.

NCPEA Connexions authors are encouraged to track their Impact and submit to their department, college, and university for professional development and P & T purposes.

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