Elsevier Poised to Take on Thomson Reuters in Citation Metrics Market

Each June, editors, publishers, and authors anxiously await the release of the Journal Citation Report (JCR)-a dataset that reports, among other things, Journal Impact Factors for approximately 12,000 scholarly publications.

While new titles are added to the JCR each year, several dozens will be suppressed for "anomalous citation patterns." Stated in more direct language, the JCR will kick out journals that attempt to game the system. Thomson Reuters, the publishers of the JCR, prefers to use language that does not infer intent; however, the result is the same. Last year, 38 titles were delisted from the JCR