The impact of technological research through an analysis of literature

A set of patterns related to the impact factor of technological journals has been analyzed, with emphasis on radiation instrumentation and medical physics publications. Attention was devoted in particular to two IEEE journals, IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science and IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, representative of these categories. The results are compared to a similar survey of particle physics journals. The weight of citations coming from inside the same subject area has been evaluated with respect to the amount of citations deriving from publications in external domains. A preliminary analysis hints to a significant degree of correlation between a high impact factor of some journals and a large fraction of citations originating from the same field. The results highlight the cross-disciplinary role of technological journals.