In the first phase of CiteScholar, we are computing Impact Factors for a wide variety of publications, but mostly conferences with an emphasis on computer science. This is intended to be a purely quantitative indicator based on the Google Scholar information. The impact factors are particularly important for computer science because conferences are often the main publication venue but it is not clear what the impact is of different meetings.

In a given year, the impact factor of a publication is the average number of citations received per paper published in that journal during the two preceding years.

Suppose we wanted to compute the impact factor for the year 2010 for a publication. Let us assume that 50 papers were published in each of the years 2008 and 2009, which amounts to a total of 100 papers. We count how many citations were made to the 100 papers in the year 2010. Suppose the total number of citations was 250 in the year 2010. Then we can say that the impact factor for the publication in the year 2010 was 250/100 or 2.5