2020 Journal Impact Metrics

OUTDATED, see the 2021 blog post for new data.

The 2020 impact factors were just released, and the Semantic Web journal is at 3.182, roughly the same as last year. We will compare it with the impact factors from the same journals we compared it with in previous years.

First the list of "Web" journals which we generated four years ago for comparison, together with the new, updated, impact factors.

Semantic Web 3.182
World Wide Web - Internet and Web Information Systems 2.892
International Journal of Web and Grid Services 2.750
Journal of Web Semantics 2.238
International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems 1.742
ACM Transactions on the Web 1.157
International Journal of Web Services Research 0.868

The Semantic Web journal still tops this list, though the next two listed journals have improved their impact factor significantly and are closely behind.

Like last year, here are some journals (the same as last year in fact) with overlapping scope.

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering: 4.935
Information Systems 4.188
Semantic Web 3.182
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 3.147
Knowledge and Information Systems 2.936
VLDB Journal 2.904
World Wide Web - Internet and Web Information Systems 2.892
Multimedia Tools and Applications 2.313
Journal of Web Semantics 2.238
International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems 1.742
Data & Knowledge Engineering 1.476
ACM Transactions on the Web 1.157
Applied Ontology 0.852

In terms of order, we moved from second to third as Information Systems significantly improved their impact factor. Generally speaking, the field is much more densely packed.

Some journals covering generically larger communities of course have higher impact factors.

Communications of the ACM 6.988
Knowledge-based Systems 5.921
Artificial Intelligence 6.628
IEEE Intelligent Systems 3.210

- but these are not really our competition.

Also, Google Scholar just updated its conference and journal metrics. If we look at the listing of top ranked conferences and journals - in terms of Google Scholar h5-index - with "Web" in the title, via the live link or the snapshot below (from July 2020), we notice that the Semantic Web journal is listed as the top ranked journal, like last year, and with h5-index slightly improved.

While this is of course a satisfying ranking for the Semantic Web journal, we want to emphasize that the Google Scholar h5-ranking and the impact factor have to be interpreted with caution, like all such metrics.