A Simulation Model Based on Artificial System to Analyze Correlation between Journal Impact Factor and Article Quality

As the most significant evaluation indicator in Journal Citation Report, Journal Impact Factor (JIF) plays a very important role in the process of assessing academic journals. However, the related study on JIF is only focused on bibliometrics and scientometrics. To remedy this issue, we proposed a social computing simulation model to analyze the correlation between JIF and quality of articles. In the model, a social problem can be evaluated from the perspective of simulation analysis and complex system, in which certain factors can be denoted by some parameters and agents. As an agent-based model, the JIF system consists of three agents (Author, Article and Journal). The simulation result and experimental analysis strongly demonstrated that the calculation of JIF can be modeled by the proposed model. Furthermore, it can be found that JIF can be reflected by the quality of the published articles.