Surviving bad times: The role of citations, self-citations and numbers of citable items in recovery of the journal impact factor after at least four years of continuous decreases

We studied the influence of the number of citations, the number of citable items and the number of journal self-citations on increases in the impact factor (IF) in 123 journals from the Journal Citation Reports database in which this scientometric indicator had decreased during the previous four years. In general, we did not find evidence that abuse of journal self-citations contributed to the increase in the impact factor after several years of decreases.