Currency Factor

Currency Factor aims to compare journals on how rapidly their articles become cited. It examines a three-year interval, determining how many articles in Westlaw's Journals and Law Reviews (JLR) database that were made available during those three years cite items that were published by a journal during those same three years. Taking for example the 2015-2019 survey period: Currency Factor is the number of articles added to Westlaw's JLR database in the three-year period of 2015-2017 that cite to volumes of a journal dated during those same three years, divided by the number of items published by the journal during those same years. It would have been desirable to create this index from the final three years of the survey period, but the data on which it is based, being automatically created from annual data collected to calculate Impact Factor, is in a form that requires the use of the first three years of each survey period. For any journal that began publication after the beginning of the survey period, the three years will be the first three years of the journal's existence.