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I am interested to know where arXiv stands against the journals. Not being peer-reviewed, and being so huge, certainly could contribute to arXiv having a very low impact factor, but since ultra-high-quality work also gets published there, it might still have a higher impact factor than some journals that only contain rather poor quality work that couldn't get published anywhere else.

Of course the "whole of arXiv" could have a different impact factor than specific arXiv channels, such as "astro-ph" or "quant-ph".

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    Such a measure would be misleading. Most arXiv preprints are eventually published as journal or conference papers, and from that point on, people generally cite the journal/conference version. So counting citations of the arXiv version would underestimate the paper's long-term impact.
    – Nate Eldredge
    Commented Mar 29, 2019 at 22:14
  • @NateEldredge: maybe it would under-estimate the paper's long-term impact, but I (and most others) are aware of what arXiv is and how it works, so we don't expect to use arXiv's impact factor when deciding whether or not to hire faculty members (for example). Instead I'm just curious where arXiv would stand. This is why I asked whether or not there's any "un-official" estimate of arXiv's impact factor (perhaps done by some enthusiast who calculated it as a fun side-project).
    – Hastings
    Commented Mar 29, 2019 at 22:22
  • I vaguely recall Google Scholar including arXiv categories in its metrics, but either they stopped or my memory is playing tricks on me.
    – JeffE
    Commented Mar 29, 2019 at 22:40
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    @Hastings: Right, but I think this issue would make it misleading to try to use impact factor to determine "where arXiv stands" relative to journals, since journals have a much longer time frame to collect citations.
    – Nate Eldredge
    Commented Mar 29, 2019 at 23:18
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    @NateEldredge The impact factor does not measure the long-term impact of a paper, but the short-term one (at least in the time scale of mathematics): it only considers citations obtained by a paper in the two years after its appearance.
    – Federico Poloni
    Commented Mar 30, 2019 at 10:28

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arXiv does not have an impact factor because it is not indexed by Clarivate Analytics (for good reason, since not everything on arXiv is sensible).

I'm not aware of any unofficial estimates of arXiv's impact factor, but presumably you can get one by adding up all the citations that are generated in the field (multiply the impact factor of all journals by the number of articles if you have to) and dividing by the number of articles on arXiv.

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