Structure of the impact factor of academic journals in the field of Education and Educational Psychology: Citations from editorial board members

Summary We present a new approach to study the structure of the impact factor of academic journals. This new method is based on calculation of the fraction of citations that contribute to the impact factor of a given journal that come from citing documents in which at least one of the authors is a member of the cited journal's editorial board. We studied the structure of three annual impact factors of 54 journals included in the groups “Education and Educational Research” and “Psychology, Educational” of the Social Sciences Citation Index. The percentage of citations from papers authored by editorial board members ranged from 0% to 61%. In 12 journals, for at least one of the years analysed, 50% or more of the citations that contributed to the impact factor were from documents published in the journal itself. Given that editorial board members are considered to be among the most prestigious scientists, we suggest that citations from papers authored by editorial board members should be given particular consideration.