Editor's Notes

• Author: Mark A. Hager
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• Date: 01 September 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21337

EDITOR'S NOTES

The Winter 2016 issue of Nonprofit Management & Leadership includes my editorial on impact fac-

tors, a metric of journal article citation published annually by Clarivate Analytics. New impact factors

were announced this summer. They are dubbed the “2017 impact factors”because they represent the

calculated occurrences of all 2017 published and indexed journal articles that cite a given journal's

published articles in the past two or five years. Citation in “indexed journals”is a defining feature of

the Clarivate Analytics impact factor, as citations in books, non-indexed journals, research reports,

and theses are not considered. Although the five-year impact factor is a better measure of social sci-

ence journals than the two-year impact factor, the two-year impact factor is most commonly reported.

Take a look at the internet homepage for Nonprofit Management & Leadership: Line one has the

journal name, line two has the editor name, and line three has the two-year impact factor. The impact

factor has limitations and detractors, but journals live and die by their impact factors.

Articles published in 2017 (in journals tracked by Clarivate Analytics) made 98 citations of arti-

cles published in Nonprofit Management & Leadership in 2015 and 2016. In those two years, Non-

profit Management & Leadership published 60 articles, case studies, and research notes. The impact

factor is the ratio of citations to articles published, or 98 over 60, or a 2017 impact factor of 1.63.

This is an appreciable jump over last year's 1.24, and is the fifth year in a row that the journal's two-

year impact factor has increased. It falls between Voluntas's 1.27 and Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector

Quarterly's 1.93. These most recent reported impact factors represent only the third time that Non-

profit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly's impact factor has exceeded 1.63, which is evidence that Non-

profit Management & Leadership is now very favorably represented among journals in the nonprofit

and philanthropic studies space. As I mentioned in my Winter 2016 editorial, improved impact fac-

tors make the journal more attractive to scholars looking to publish their best work, and Nonprofit

Management & Leadership is now benefitting from this imprimatur. We are receiving and publishing

high quality work, which bodes well for another bump in the impact factor next summer.

Certainly the number of submissions to the journal have increased substantially over the last sev-

eral years. When I applied in 2014 to take on the job as editor in 2015, the guideline was that the

journal was receiving “around 100”new submissions each year. Indeed, submissions did not reach

100 in 2014. However, submissions jumped quickly, and NML received its 100th submission in

2015 on August 6. The summer pace relented slightly during the next two years, when we received

number 100 on August 18 in 2016 and on August 15 in 2017. The late-year pace picked up last year,

though, when NML set an annual record of 174 submissions. We look primed to break that record

again in 2018, since the 100th new manuscript submission came in on July 20, almost a month ahead

of last year. The uptick in submissions, paired with the attraction of higher quality work, means that

competition to publish in Nonprofit Management & Leadership is stronger than ever.

My tradition has been to focus each of my editorials on a particular issue, and I have not meant

for this quarter's editorial to focus on impact factors and submission rates. Rather, I want to discuss

an issue that the journal has recently gained experience with: the dicey issue of self-plagiarism.

DOI: 10.1002/nml.21337

Nonprofit Management and Leadership. 2018;29:7–10. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/nml © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 7