On the impact factors of two pseudo-academic journals

Here I try to examine the credibility of 2 not-very-highly regarded "peer-reviewed" journals devoted largely, or entirely, to the field of psychometrics: Mankind Quarterly (MQ), the most notorious pseudoscientific "race realism" journal in the history of the entire world, and Open Differential Psychology (ODP), a new-ish open access journal started by Emil Kirkegaard, who only has a bachelor's degree in an unrelated field (linguistics). Kirkegaard also publishes two other journals on the website openpsych.net: Open Behavioral Genetics (OBG) and Open Quantitative Sociology & Political Science (OQSPS).

Consider MQ first. The most cited article on Google Scholar (GS) published in MQ in 2015 or 2016 is "Admixture in the Americas: Regional and National Differences" by Kirkegaard and Fuerst. The article in question has been cited 22 times on GS since it was published in 2016. Sounds pretty solid-but of these 22 citations, all of them were either to non-peer reviewed sources or articles published in MQ or one of Kirkegaard's "Open" journals...except for 3 (14%) (articles 1, 2, 3). When one looks at the 7 citations for "The genealogy of differences in the Americas" by Fuerst, one similarly finds that only 1 of them (14%, article 3 in the last paragraph) is in a peer-reviewed journal outside of the "race realist" echo chamber (i.e. MQ or one of the three openpsych.net journals mentioned above).

A more precise picture can be obtained by searching ProQuest for articles published in each journal. When this is done for MQ, one gets 90 results, similar to the 88 obtained using GS. But citation counts are much more discouraging here, which is to be expected since it's a more selective database. In fact, of the 90 results for MQ, only 6 of them (7%) are even cited once on ProQuest. Currently, when I add up citation counts for the 6 results I got most recently I get a total of 10 citations. 

I then try to figure out how many of those citations were in 2017. The answer is...5 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). This yields an IF of 5/6 = 0.833, which isn't encouraging (but not that terrible: Psychological Reports' IF is a bit lower.) 

What about the openpsych journals? For ODP there are 7 citable articles in the period of interest, the most cited of which is, no surprise, the one about OKCupid data. Of its 11 citations, 3 of them are outside the echo chamber (1, 2, 3). The other 6 articles weren't cited at all in legit sources, yielding an IF of 3/7 = 0.429.

Neither of the IFs obtained here are very impressive, certainly, which doesn't bode well for the journals' credibility. This is obviously truer for MQ (which is over 50 yrs. old) than for ODP (which is only a few years old).