Publishing in January and Impact on Citations: Does the Data Support the Strategy?

There are many conventional wisdoms surrounding maximizing citations. With rare exceptions, these largely hold true under scrutiny; however, one oft-mentioned strategy is the assertion that articles published in January contribute more citations to the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) due to their longer exposure time—sometimes referred to as “issue frontloading.” In its simplest form, the JIF is the average number of times articles published in the last 2 years are cited in a given year. The argument follows that because January-published articles are available to be cited for the largest percentage of this 2-year window, then publishing more content in January leads to a higher JIF. However, we have doubts. Firstly, we have never actually seen evidence of this presented at the journal level to prove the theory correct, and secondly, when we have done the occasional analysis illustrating citation distribution over the calendar year, it has never shown that the January issue is the highest contributor to JIF. Figure 1 is an actual example—taken from a recent JIF analysis of a title published by Lippincott, the journal imprint of Wolters Kluwer—of how a journal’s individual issues compare with each other in terms of contribution to JIF. Noticeably, there is no identifiable trend over the course of the calendar year, and January was certainly not the biggest contributor to this journal’s JIF. The source of this supposed strategy is the assertion that citations are primarily driven by an article’s exposure as measured by time. It is true that citations do roughly […]