# Comparing the impact of subfields in scientific journals

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04244 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04244/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jan 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [From Insights to Actions: The Impact of Interpretability and Analysis Research on NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12618/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The impact factor has been extensively used in the last years to assess journals visibility and prestige. While the impact factor is useful to compare journals, the specificities of subfields visibility in journals are overlooked whenever visibility is measured only at the journal level. In this paper, we analyze the subfields visibility in a subset of over 450,000 Physics papers. We show that the visibility of subfields is not regular in the considered dataset. In particular years, the variability in subfields impact factor in a journal reached 75% of the average subfields impact factor. We also found that the difference of subfields visibility in the same journal can be even higher than the difference of visibility between different journals. Our results show that subfields impact is an important factor accounting for journals visibility.