On March 20th Clarivate announced the exclusion of 82 journals from the Web of Science core collection. These de-listed journals also lost their Impact Factor. 19 Hindawi journals were delisted however, a number of major publishers have been affected by this move including Taylor and Francis, Wiley, Springer and Elsevier.

The impact factor of journals is curated by Clarivate Analytics Web of Science group. They use the average of the sum of the citations received in a given year to a journal’s previous two years of publications, divided by the sum of “citable” publications in the previous two years.

Although not without its detractors, this long-established metric carries weight with authors and institutions and often helps authors to identify which journals to publish in. The delisting and loss of their Impact Factor will be a major blow to the affected journals, as citations in journals outside Web of Science-listed titles do not count towards a scholar’s h-index. Therefore, these journals will find themselves less attractive to academics seeking a place to publish their research.

The announcement was made in the midst of a series of complaints that have been made against major scientific publishers suspected of not carrying out the due process of peer review, publishing articles without scientific rigor in exchange for high publication fees, mostly paid with public money. Clarivate have stated that the affected journals no longer meet their quality criteria.

Read the full announcement from Clarivate here. The full list of delisted journals can be found here.

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