I have always wondered whether the impact factor was a reasonable metric to describe the journal performance of Optical Engineering. This month, I have had some pretty good discussions with SPIE staff and some of the other SPIE journal editors about the topic. For those of you who are not familiar with the impact factor, it is described on the Thomson Reuters site (http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/free/essays/impact_factor/) as follows: The impact factor is... a measure of the frequency with which the "average article" in a journal has been cited in a particular year or period. The annual impact factor is a ratio between citations and recent citable items published. Thus, the impact factor of a journal is calculated by dividing the number of current year citations to the source items published in that journal during the previous two years.
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