For the last 50 years, the journal impact factor (IF) has been the most prominent of all bibliometric indicators. Since the first Journal Citation Report was launched, the IF has been used, often improperly, to evaluate institutions, publications, and individuals. Its well-known significant technical limitations have not detracted from its popularity, and they contrast with the lack of consensus over the numerous alternatives suggested as complements or replacements. This paper presents a percentile-distribution-based proposal for assessing the influence of scientific journals and publications that corrects several of the IF’s main technical limitations using the same set of documents as is used to calculate the IF. Nearly 400 journals of Library Science and Information Science and Biochemistry and Molecular Biology categories were analyzed for this purpose. The results show that the new indicator retains many of its predecessor’s advantages and adds benefits of its own: It is more accurate, more gaming resistant, more complete, and less influenced by the citation window or extreme observations.

Scientific excellence is an ongoing object of quantitative analysis of science and technology literature. The most commonly adopted of the various criteria for such quantification is to define highly cited papers as the ones lying in the first percentile (top 1%) of citation counts. Wagner and colleagues have recently proposed a new method in which citation counts are determined as a whole, irrespective of discipline. This study analyzes the practical implications of the new approach compared to the traditional procedure in which papers are ranked bearing in mind the scientific field involved, with particular attention to the consequences for rankings by country and discipline. The results show that the new methodology favors countries with a predominance of polytechnical scientific production, technological development, and innovation and lowers the rank of countries where the social sciences, humanities, and basic research account for the lion’s share of output. An analysis of worldwide production confirms the growth of scientific output in technical and technological disciplines.