In contrast, this slide shows the list of journals most-cited in 2004. The JBC was cited over 400,000 times last year – this includes citations to any articles in its entire history.
However, we also recognized that smaller but important review and specialty journals might not be selected if we depended solely on total publication or citation counts.
We needed a simple method for comparing journals regardless of size or citation frequency. So we created the journal “impact factor.”