Beyond Journal Prestige: A Realization – Based Author Impact Metric

The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) remains one of the most influential yet controversial bibliometric indicators in global academia. Although originally designed as a journal-level citation metric, it is frequently misused for evaluating individual researchers by aggregating the impact factors of journals in which they publish. Such practices conflate journal prestige with article-level performance and distort research evaluation. In this study, we propose a novel author-level metric, the Realized Impact Factor (RIF), which quantifies the ratio between actual citations received within a fixed citation window and expected citation potential inferred from journal impact factors at the time of publication. By introducing 5-year and 10-year citation windows, RIF corrects for temporal bias and provides a realization-based assessment of scientific influence. The mathematical foundation of RIF is presented along with illustrative examples, followed by a comparative discussion with existing author-level indices. The relevance of the metric is examined in the context of Indian academic evaluation frameworks and global research assessment reforms. RIF shifts evaluation from venue-based prestige to demonstrable scholarly realization, offering a transparent and performance-sensitive indicator for author-level impact assessment.