Fair Representation of Transportation Research Record Impacts: Case Study on Journal Citation Reports' Impact Factor

This paper presents results of a qualitative survey and a quantitative assessment of the relative impacts of transportation journals. The survey involved 80 research university professors, government employees, and practitioners randomly chosen to rate a list of peer-reviewed transportation journals. The quantitative assessment consisted of an extensive examination of the impact factor (IF), a widely used metric for comparing scholarly publications, of 30 major transportation journals. Although the Transportation Research Record (TRR) was ranked by far as the most “useful and important” to the work of all those surveyed in the field of transportation, the TRR's IF is lower than those of most other transportation journals. However, compared with other transportation journals, the TRR publishes the most scholarly papers and receives the most citations annually. It is also the most widely accessed by practitioners. This paper explores key factors that affect IF calculations and identifies strategies to enhance the TRR's IF with nominal and major changes to the current process and procedures. These strategies focus on increasing exposure time of papers published in the TRR and increasing timely access to TRR issues, as well as exploring the potential to subdivide the TRR into several thematic sections, which would lead to substantial increases in the IFs of several of the parts.