Modeling and Simulation Analysis of Journal Impact Factor Dynamics Based on Submission and Citation Rules

The variation of the journal impact factor is affected by many statistical and sociological factors such as the size of citation window and subject difference. In this work, we develop an impact factor dynamics model based on the parallel system, which can be used to analyze the correlation between the impact factor and certain elements. The parallel model aims to simulate the submission and citation behaviors of the papers in journals belonging to a similar subject, in a distributed manner. We perform Monte Carlo simulations to show how the model parameters influence the impact factor dynamics. Through extensive simulations, we reveal the important role that certain statistics elements and behaviors play to affect impact factors. The experimental results and analysis on actual data demonstrate that the value of the JIF is comprehensively influenced by the average review time, average number of references, and aging distribution of citation.