Impact Factor Decline of JMBFS: Understanding the Reasons

We would like to inform our readers about the recent change in the impact factor (IF) of the Journal of Microbiology, Biotechnology and Food Sciences (JMBFS). Unfortunately, our impact factor has dropped from 0.9 to 0.6. This decline can be attributed to an unexpected issue with duplicate articles indexed in Web of Science, which directly affected the calculation of our impact factor.

Over the past two years, we have published around 360 articles. However, due to a technical error, approximately 140 of these articles were counted as duplicates. This significantly inflated the total number of articles considered in the denominator during the impact factor calculation.

For clarification, the impact factor is calculated as the ratio between the number of citations a journal receives and the total number of articles published within a two-year period. In our case, while the number of citations remained constant, the duplicate articles added 140 extra entries into the denominator. This artificial increase in the total number of articles caused our impact factor to drop by 0.3 points.

On average, JMBFS publishes around 180 articles annually, and the presence of these duplicates distorted the overall metrics for our journal. We are actively working on resolving this issue with Web of Science to ensure that our published article count reflects the accurate number of unique publications.

We are committed to maintaining high standards in research and publishing, and we will continue our efforts to improve the journal’s metrics and overall scientific contribution. We thank our readers, authors, and reviewers for their continued support as we work to correct this issue and regain our standing in the academic community.