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INTRODUCTION
Assessment of research quality is an important activity in all academic and professional fields. Citation-based evaluation metrics have been the most common method in the last few decades. As the only provider of citation data, the Institute for Scientific Information (now Thomson Reuters) has a long-established monopoly of the market. The Journal Impact Factor (JIF), first conceived in 1955 by Eugene Garfield, was the main quantitative measure of quality for scientific journals. The JIFs, published annually in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), are widely used for quality ranking of journals and extensively used by leading journals in their advertising (Elsaie & Kammer, 2009). The JIFs are also used for a variety of other purposes. "For instance, it is used by librarians as a criterion for selecting library collections. JIF is also used by researchers to decide where they will submit their research manuscripts. JIF also serves as an evaluation tool by institutions for recruitment, promotion, research grant allocation, and project funding" (Law & Li, 2015, p. 19). "The JIF is generally defined as the recorded number of citations within a certain year (for example, 2015) to the items published in the journal during the two preceding years (2013 and 2014), divided by the number of such items (this would be the equivalent of the average citation rate of an item during the first and second calendar year after the year of publication). Only citations between journals indexed in the Thomson Reuter's Web of Science (WoS) are used (Cantin, Munoz & Roa, 2015, pp. 1183-1184).
The JCR Journal Impact Factor maintains its monopoly to date and is considered the best instrument for...