Thomson Reuters announced two months ago the 2013 release of its Journal Citation Reports (JCR), the source of the annual Journal Impact Factors. In comparison to last year, there are no significant changes. Interestingly, however, most impact factors have slightly decreased. Furthermore, the impact factor of the only open-access journal in robotics considered in JCR, the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, has dropped to 0.497 from 0.821, despite its high level of self cites (43%). This year again, Meccanica and the Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics rely on very high rates of self citation (43% and 38%, respectively). This basically means that their impact factors are probably artificially inflated by at least 20%.
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