Integrating Citation Heterogeneity to Measure the Quality of Academic Journals

Evaluating the quality of academic journals is important and complex. The journal impact factor (IF), which is the most widely used indicator to measure the quality of academic journals, assumes that all citations are homogeneous. The use of this indicator has been widely criticized due to its inherent limitations. In recent years, several sophisticated indicators have been proposed to allow the weighting of citations from different journals. However, the recursive computation process of these indicators requires a huge amount of data. This paper proposes a new indicator with citation heterogeneity to measure journal quality, which is named the Citation Author Affiliation Index (CAAI). The CAAI is based on the assumption that citing paper authors’ institutions can be ranked and are considered a proxy to measure the quality of citations (in a statistical sense). It is shown that the CAAI is easy to use and interpret, time-efficient, and adaptable. The effectiveness of the CAAI is validated by using Web of Science citation data from journals in several research categories.