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Q: Will my paper's visibility be affected due to the journal's recent title change?

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When a journal's title has changed, there is no IF in the first year, and usually, the IF is low in the second year. How do papers published during this period get recognition?

Asked on 16 Jun, 2017

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Answer:

When a journal changes its name, the official title change is completed only after two JCR years. In the first year, the new title does not have an IF because the journal would not have any articles published under the new title for the two preceding years. Hence, in the first year after the title change, the IF is assigned to the old title and not the new one. The new title has an Immediacy Index for the first year in place of the IF.

In the second year, separate IFs are calculated for both the old and new titles. The IF for the new title will be comparatively low as the articles published in it are more recent and hence, might not have received too many citations. On the other hand, the IF for the old title will be higher because the articles in it are older and have, therefore, received more citations. To get an accurate picture of the IF of the journal, a Unified IF based on both the new and old title is calculated.

From the third year, only the new journal title will be there in JCR with a proper Impact Factor.

To answer your question, you can do a few things if your paper is published in a journal in the first or second year of its title change:

1. You can give the old title in brackets along with its IF; for example: "published in journal XXXX (previously known as journal YYYY, IF 14.06)"

2. You can give the immediacy index in the first year and the unified impact factor in teh second year after the title change.

Additionally, you must remember that the IF of the journal is not a very good measure of the quality of an article. Article-level metrics such as the number of citations your paper has received or whether it is generating discussion in scholarly cirlcles or social media, often give your article more recognition.