Joint Behaviors of Submission and Citation-Based Study on Temporal Variation of Journal Impact Factor

Impact Factor is the most important indicator in SCI, which is a quantitative tool for evaluating the ranks and the grades of various scientific journals in the Journal Citation Report (JCR) database. In some sense, impact factor has been perhaps viewed as the most commonly used indicator to measure the quality of journals. The main purpose of this paper is to build a parallel model for exploring the variation of journal impact factors, in a distributed manner. In combination with social computing methods, our model endeavors to model and simulate the behaviors of manuscript submission and paper citation. Based on simulation experiment results to understand the cause of certain phenomena such as the relation between JIF and the academic quality of the journals. The simulation results demonstrate that the behaviors of submission and citation would be influenced and driven by JIF, and the academic quality of journals is consistent with the level of JIF.