12 Pedometron 39, November 2016 More on Soil Science Journal’s Impact Factor By Budiman Minasny and Alex McBratney In June this year, Thomson & Reuter released its journal Impact Fac- tors for 2015. Editors of journals are enthusiastic to share their jour- nal’s impact factor, while most of us have a hate-love relationship with it. The journal impact factor was conceptualised in the 1960s and has been around for more than 40 years, and it is still being used as a major measure of any particular journal’s quality. We are en- couraged to submit our papers to journals with high impact factors. It is even used to demonstrate researchers’ achievements. Ivan Oransky from Stat News wrote that impact factor “is a bit like a corrupt bureaucrat: overly powerful, largely incompetent, and widely feared.” As we know, a journal’s impact factor for a particular year is calculat- ed from the average number of times that a journal’s articles is cited over the previous 2 years. For example Soil Biology and Biochemistry currently has an impact factor of 4.152 which is interpreted as the journal’s articles have an average citation of 4. However, a high im- pact factor journal does not imply that all its papers have high cita- tion numbers. We have covered this here and here. The calculation is done by Thomson Reuters, and not in a very trans- parent way. A journal’s impact factor can be manipulated in various ways, including editorials with lots of self citations, editors’ coercive citations, citation cartels, etc. Recently, a paper published in the bio- RXiv preprint exam- ined the citation dis- tribution of some high impact factor journals. The re- searchers looked at the citation statistics of 11 journals (including Science and Nature), and they found that their citation distribu- tions are so Figure 1. Citation network of selected soil science journals from Thompson Reuters’ web of science.