An academic journal's impact factor (hereafter JIF) is an average measure of the citation count of individual articles published in that journal. JIF is used to assess merit, predict impact, and allocate resources, but the actual number of citations to individual articles is only modestly correlated with the JIFs of the journals in which they are published. We counted PsycInfo citations to 1,133 articles published in nine leading psychology journals (1996-2005). Both article length (r =.31) and reference list length (r = .41) predicted log-transformed citation counts better than JIF (r = .27). Articles with fewer graphs and more structural equation models were more frequently cited. Citation count was better predicted by a model based on article length and citation count rather than JIF. When JIF was used to predict citation count, the impact of women authors and social science research was underestimated. These findings distinguish impact in science, as measured by JIF, from actual impact in psychology, and they show the unintended consequences of using a measure of the former to predict the latter.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 27. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 17 March 2026.
All research outputs
#1,616,332
of 28,841,988 outputs
Outputs from Perspectives on Psychological Science
#557
of 1,319 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#9,654
of 262,958 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Perspectives on Psychological Science
#2
of 10 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 28,841,988 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 94th percentile: it's in the top 10% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,319 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 74.2. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 57% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 262,958 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 96% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 10 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has scored higher than 8 of them.
