Year: 2025
Type: editorial
Abstract: T he recent release of citation metrics of scientific journals by Clarivate offers insight into the impact of published papers in 2022 and 2023.Among the various metrics available, Journal Impact Factor (JIF) remains the most popular among librarians, administrators, publishers and authors.The JIF reflects citations to all articles (editorial and peer-reviewed) published in the previous two years, although only peerreviewed articles are included in the denominator.The JIF offers a measure of a journal's impact based on the previous two years but does not indicate what fraction of articles drove that number.Median citation values, on the other hand, provide an estimate of the impact of the "middle" article.Often, article median values are lower than JIF, indicating that only a small fraction of highly cited papers are disproportionately driving the overall impact factor.Interestingly, review type articles tend to have median values greater than the JIF, contributing positively to the journal impact.As in previous years, we have compiled the citation analysis of representative energy journals.Table 1 summarizes citation metrics reported by the Journal Citation Reports from Clarivate Analytics (https://jcr.clarivate.com/jcr/home) and CiteScore from Scopus (https://www.elsevier.com/products/scopus/ metrics/citescore).Although previous years have seen a Roller Coaster ride in JIF, 1 this year's data (Table 1) show a general stabilization in JIF compared to last year.The 2024 JIF for Energy journals ranged from 60.1 to 3.1, while CiteScore varied from 73.0 to 6.1.It may be interesting to note that the journals publishing fewer papers, less than 150 per year, tend show higher JIFs compared to those publishing over 2000 articles (Figure 1).The inverse relationship between the impact factor and the publication volume was discussed in a previous editorial.2 ACS Energy Letters has received an impact factor of 18.2 this year.Most energy journals have maintained their previous JIF or registered small increases.However, Joule, Energy & Environmental Science, and ACS Energy Letters experienced slight declines.Articles reporting advances in storage batteries, solar cells and solar fuels continue to dominate publications in energy research.It is worth noting that the impact of the published articles is driven by the popularity of individual disciplines, number of researchers engaged in the corresponding energy research topic and major research breakthroughs.We also determined the impact of specific topics published in ACS Energy Letters during 2022-2023 and their citations in 2024 (Source: Web of Science Core Collection, Clarivate).The average citation of key topics are presented in Table 2 and Figure 2. Most topics lie around the journal's average citation/impact, thus showing a well-balanced citation distribution.Zn-ion and Na-ion storage batteries, electrocatalysis and N 2 reduction received above-average citations, while perovskites and solar cells were slightly below the average.On behalf of the editorial team, I would like to convey our appreciation to our authors, reviewers, and readers for their continued support.We look forward to receiving your contributions reporting new advances in energy research with profound scientific insights.Welcoming a new Topic Editor.Dr. Lakshminarayana Polavarapu will
Source: ACS Energy Letters
Author: Prashant V. Kamat
Institution: University of Notre Dame
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4413119043