FIU Libraries: Citation Analysis & Journal Rankings: Journal Impact

Things to Remember

Journal impact factors change over time.
Journal impact factors differ greatly from one field to another so the impact factor of journals in biology may be different than the impact factor of journals in mathematics. Journal impact factors have limitations and should not be the single factor used to evaluate an authors work.

Some of the reasons for not relying on impact factor alone to evaluate the output of a particular individual include:

A single factor is not sufficient for evaluating of an author's work.
Journal values are meaningless unless compared within the same discipline. Impact factors vary among disciplines.
The impact factor was originally devised to show the impact of a specific journal, not a specific scholar. The quality and impact of the author's work may extend beyond the impact of a particular journal.

According to Jim Testa, a researcher for ThomsonReuters Scientific, the most widespread misuse of the Impact Factor is to evaluate the work of an individual author (instead of a journal). "To say that because a researcher is publishing in a certain journal, he or she is more influential or deserves more credit is not necessarily true. There are many other variables to consider."

(interview 6/26/2008 in Thomson Reuters blog entry)

JOURNAL ACCEPTANCE RATES

FSU's Journal Acceptance Rates
FSU provides some tools to identify the acceptance rates of journals in specific fields.

What will you find here?

Use the resources on this page to find quantitative data for assessing journal quality. Note that such tools tend to be more useful for publications in the natural and social sciences.

What are journal rankings?

It is the quantitative analysis of peer reviewed journals used to gain a more complete picture of a scholar's impact in his chosen field. Journal rankings are based on three different measures:

number of publications
number of times an author's publications have been cited
the importance of the journal where the article is published, also called the Journal Ranking.

The ranking of the journal also known as the impact or importance of a journal can guide authors on whether they will choose to submit an article. The higher the impact, the more important the journal. Oftentimes librarians use journal rankings to make decisions about collection development.

Journal Citation Reports This link opens in a new window
Measures the journal impact factor by measuring the importance of a journal by calculating the number of times its articles are cited. The calculation is based on a two-year period and involves dividing the number of times articles were cited by the number of articles that are citable.
Web of Science Core Collection This link opens in a new window
From the drop-down menu, select Publication Titles. When you get your results, click Citation Report.
Scopus This link opens in a new window
Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature: scientific journals, books and conference proceedings. Delivering a comprehensive overview of the world's research output in the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and arts and humanities, Scopus features smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research.
Eigenfactor Metrics This link opens in a new window
A free and searchable database that ranks journals. It reports journal prices as well as citation influence across disciplines over a 5-year period. Click Eigenfactor Metrics to search.

Google Scholar Metrics
Analyzes the the last five years of journal articles from websites that follow Google's inclusion guidelines as well as conference articles and preprints from a small number of manually identified sources. Excludes publications with less than 100 articles during the five-year period and those with no citations.
SCImago Journal and Country Rank
A free website that uses Scopus data to calculate SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) and Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP). Use SCIimago to compare rankings of up to 10 journals at one time.
CWTS Journal Indicators
The Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University in the Netherlands developed SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) based on Scopus data. The journal indicators provide free access to bibliometric indicators on 20,000+ scientific journals.

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Citation Analysis & Journal Rankings

Things to Remember

JOURNAL ACCEPTANCE RATES

What will you find here?

What are journal rankings?

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