The European Journal of Physics, supported by the Sfen, now has an Impact Factor
Now endowed with an impact factor and recognised by the European Physical Society, the European Journal of Physics N (Nuclear Sciences and Technologies – EPJ-N), launched by the Sfen in 2015, is making its mark in the world of academic research in nuclear fields.
Launched in 2015 with the backing of the Sfen, the European Nuclear Society (ENS), and the publisher EDP Sciences, the European Journal of Physics N (Nuclear Sciences and Technologies – EPJ-N) is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that is open access and freely available, publishing research on a broad range of nuclear topics. Recently, two announcements have forecasted promising prospects for the journal. Firstly, EPJ-N has received its inaugural impact factor, boosting its growth in terms of publications. Secondly, EPJ-N has officially joined the list of journals recognised by the European Physical Society alongside prestigious publishers such as Springer and Elsevier.
The Impact Factor, the key to competition between academic journals
In a 2017 RGN article, Gilles Moutiers, co-editor-in-chief of the journal, believed that EPJ-N was then limited by the absence of an impact factor (IF). Indeed, “researchers, especially the younger ones, [tend to] favour already referenced journals”. Gilles Moutiers concluded the interview by saying: “The next big step will be to be referenced and to have an impact factor”. Well, that has been achieved since last June, when the journal received its first IF!
The IF measures a journal’s importance in a given scientific field. Specifically, it is calculated in year N as the average number of citations received by all publications in years N-1 and N-2. Thus, for EPJ-N, which received an IF in 2022 of 0.5, each publication from 2020 and 2021 has received on average 0.5 citations in 2022, or in other words, every two publications has been cited once on average.
This may seem low compared to giants like the journal Nature, with an IF of over 60. However, this IF is on par with the average of the 8 “new entrants” (0.56) and the scope of scientific work that falls within the remit of EPJ-N, namely all nuclear topics (although broad: physics, design, economics, etc.), is indeed much more limited than that of journals like Nature. Moreover, the fact that EPJ-N did not have an IF until now could have played against it. The performance of scientists is measured by the number of their citations (h-index). The IF precisely defines the expected number of citations for an article published in the journal, thus incentivising the researcher.
A journal now recognised by the prestigious European Physical Society
In the same year, EPJ-N (alongside the Journal of the European Optical Society-Rapid Publications from the same publisher) was admitted to the list of journals recognised by the European Physical Society, increasing the number of recognised journals from the publisher to seven. A hallmark of the scientific quality of the work published there is particularly the rigour and impartiality of the peer-review process that governs this recognition, which is significant for an open-access journal.
Henceforth, the journal has all the tools – IF, open access, free of charge, and accreditation by the European Physical Society as a recognised journal – to compete with other scientific journals focused on nuclear topics. ■