Long and Short-Term Impact of Papers in Applied Spectroscopy

In 1955, Eugene Garfield introduced the concept of a journal impact factor as a metric for measuring the importance or influence of scholarly journals. These days a journal's fate is often tied strongly to the impact factor. It is a topic that comes up regularly and a source of concern for the journal because of the slavish focus on metrics in the publishing world and in the academic community. From our perspective, the impact factor is shown to be a poor metric for illustrating the long-term significance of papers published in Applied Spectroscopy. The five-year impact factor is a better indicator for the short-term impact of the papers published in this journal, while the cited half-life and the citing half-life both provide a better measure of the long-term impact of papers published in Applied Spectroscopy. Of the most highly cited papers published in this journal, those that describe innovative data processing techniques have been cited more than papers that describe specific applications of a given technique such as infrared (IR), Raman, or laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS).