Publication delay adjusted impact factor: The effect of publication delay of articles on journal impact factor

The journal impact factor (JIF) has been questioned considerably during its development in the past half-century because of its inconsistency with scholarly reputation evaluations of scientific journals. This paper proposes a publication delay adjusted impact factor (PDAIF) which takes publication delay into consideration to reduce the negative effect on the quality of the impact factor determination. Based on citation data collected from Journal Citation Reports and publication delay data extracted from the journals’ official websites, the PDAIFs for journals from business-related disciplines are calculated. The results show that PDAIF values are, on average, more than 50% higher than JIF results. Furthermore, journal ranking based on PDAIF shows very high consistency with reputation-based journal rankings. Moreover, based on a case study of journals published by ELSEVIER and INFORMS, we find that PDAIF will bring a greater impact factor increase for journals with longer publication delay because of reducing that negative influence. Finally, insightful and practical suggestions to shorten the publication delay are provided.