Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development
Journal of Second Language Writing
Language Awareness
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Second Language Research
Working Papers on Bilingualism.
The journal impact factor is based on the average number of citations of
articles in the journal in the previous two years. So the 2010 impact factor is
calculated on the basis of the articles in the journal from 2008 and 2009. The
2010 impact factor is published in 2011, since all the 2010 articles have to be
processed by the indexing agency. New journals, or existing journals that
have been included recently in the set of referenced journals, will get an
impact factor after two years of indexing. The journal impact factor has been
criticized on the grounds that the distributions of the citations are not nor-
mally distributed, but follow a power law distribution, which means that
there will be a few articles that attract the larger part of the citations and
many articles that are hardly cited. For such, a distribution taking the arith-
metic mean is statistically inappropriate. Therefore, direct comparisons of
journals between disciplines on the basis of the impact factor are unwarranted.
Ideally, the distributions of the citations should be added.
Table 9.5 presents the impact factors of the top six journals mentioned
earlier. For the analysis use is made of the Journal Citation Report (JCR)
function in WoS.
As the data in Table 9.5 show, not all journals have been indexed over the
1980 – 2010 period.Bilingualism: Language and Cognitiononly started in 1998,
so there is no impact factor until 2000. The JCR function in WoS only gives
impact factors from 1997 onwards.^2 There is quite some variation over time,
but the trend does not seem to go in any specific direction. In contrast to the
individual h-index, the impact factor of a journal can go down since it is
based ultimately on the number of citations its articles attract. The mean for
these six journals is 1.46 for 2012 and 1.57 for 2013, with a range of 1.00 for
TESOL Quarterlyto 2.05 forStudies in Second Language Acquisition. It should
be mentioned here that compared to other disciplines, impact factors for AL
journals tend to be low. The medical journalCellhas an impact factor of
31.9, theJournal of Experimental Psychology: Generalhas an impact factor of
4.8. The impact factor reflects the number of researchers in a certain dis-
cipline and accordingly the number of publications and citations. AL is
comparatively a smallfield.
9.11 More advanced analyses
In recent years, new methods for analyzing publication data have been
developed. Meara has explored the possibilities of co-citation analyses. This
method can be used tofind out what central issues and central researchers
The citation game 117