Assessing the publication output on country level in the research field communication using Garfield’s Impact Factor

The ever-increasing evaluation of science has led to the development of indicators at different levels. Our objective is to describe and analyze the publication output of those countries that were most active in the field between 2011 and 2020 according to the data retrieved for this category in Web of Science Core Collection. To this purpose, we are using Garfield’s Impact Factor and applying this indicator for countries instead of journals. Our results show that the most publication active countries are not those that make the most impact. We also confirm that English-speaking countries dominate the scenario in terms of number of publications and that states such as Spain and the Netherlands benefit from the Emerging Source Citation Index. Furthermore, we have found that at least 30% of most countries’ scientific production involves international collaboration and that the United States of America is the collaborator of choice in “Communication Studies”. Our study corroborates that our “country-based Impact factor” provides a quick and valuable bibliometric picture in good agreement with the results supplied by other indicators such as the Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI), the 5-year impact factor, or the Percentage of publications in the top 10%.