IMPACT

Independent Metrics for Publication Analysis and Citation Tracking

Open tools to study publication bias, impact factor inflation, and h-index gaming — using transparent, reproducible metrics from PubMed & iCite data

Journal Citation Rate Trends

Compare citation rate trends across journals and article types, or browse individual journals below.

Window:
Article type:
Show:
Y-axis:

Select one or more journals above to display citation trends.

Paper Citation Analysis

Enter a PubMed ID to see its full citation history — annual citation counts, rolling averages, and how it compares to its journal's citation rate.

Enter a PMID above to see its citation history.

Author Search

Search by name, load from an NCBI bibliography URL, or paste a list of PMIDs to analyze any author's publication record — including estimated h-index, citation trends, top journals, and article type breakdown.

May return multiple authors with similar names. Use "Lastname AB" format for best results.

or

Paste your public MyNCBI bibliography URL. All pages are fetched automatically. Find yours at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi.

or

Paste PMIDs one per line or comma-separated (e.g. exported via NCBI "Manage Citations → Export File").

Search an author name above to explore their publication history.

Geographic Breakdown

Where are papers published? See how a journal's country distribution has changed over time, based on first-author affiliation.

Select a journal

Select a journal above to see its geographic breakdown.

PMID Influence

Select a journal and enter one or more PMIDs (comma-separated) to see how those papers inflate the journal's rolling citation rate. Choose a window (12-month, 24-month, or 5-year). View as a combined counterfactual (all PMIDs removed together) or as individual dashed lines showing each paper's standalone contribution.

Select a journal and enter a PMID above to analyze its contribution to the citation rate.

About IMPACT

What is IMPACT?

IMPACT (Independent Metrics for Publication Analysis and Citation Tracking) is an open-source tool built to study publication bias, impact factor inflation, and h-index gaming in the current academic publishing system. It computes rolling 24-month journal citation rates from freely available PubMed and NIH iCite data, providing a transparent, reproducible alternative to Clarivate's proprietary Journal Impact Factor.

Key questions IMPACT helps investigate: Which journals boost their metrics with highly-cited review articles? How much does a single landmark paper or clinical guideline inflate a journal's citation rate? How do author h-indexes vary by article type, and are they padded by self-citations or review series? These questions matter for how science is evaluated, funded, and incentivized.

How is the Rolling 24-Month Citation Rate Calculated?

For each target month, IMPACT computes:

Citation Rate = Citations received in 12-month window / Research articles published in preceding 24-month window

This mirrors the official JIF methodology but uses a rolling monthly window instead of a fixed calendar year, providing more timely and granular metrics.

Data Sources

PubMed Bulk Data — 40M papers with metadata, author affiliations, and publication dates.
NIH iCite Open Citation Collection — 893M citation links, downloaded and processed locally.

Review-Excluded Citation Rate

IMPACT also computes a citation rate excluding review articles from both the numerator and denominator. This helps detect "review inflation" — when journals boost their metrics by publishing highly-cited review articles.

Tracked Journals

Accessibility & Color

All charts use the Okabe-Ito colorblind-safe palette, recommended by Nature Methods for scientific visualization. The eight core colors remain distinguishable under the most common forms of color vision deficiency — deuteranopia, protanopia, and tritanopia — which together affect roughly 8% of males and 0.5% of females. We substituted yellow and black (the original Okabe-Ito slots 7 and 8) with purple and gray for better legibility on white backgrounds.

If you have suggestions for improving accessibility, the color scheme, or any other aspect of IMPACT, please open an issue on GitHub — feedback is always welcome.

Open Source

All code and data are available on GitHub. Contributions welcome!