Research Impact

Journal Citation Reports, or JCR, is an annual publication released by Clarivate and based on the Web of Science collection. This resource incorporates Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and Eigenfactor to highlight the strength of a particular journal in its impact factor over the past year. JCR is a useful resource for researchers hoping to publish in a high impact journal.

Journal Citation Reports is sourced from Web of Science Core Collection, the premier citation index on the Web of Science platform. Journals must undergo a rigorous evaluation by our editorial team in order to be covered in Web of Science Core Collection. We capture the cited references for all content from these journals, and we link those cited references to the cited papers. This article-level citation data is aggregated to the journal-level at the end of the year to create the indicators available in JCR. Over 11,500 titles from the Science Citation Index-Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index are covered in JCR. The Science and Social Science editions of JCR are released annually.  Source

To access Journal Citation Reports, click below.

The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is a number that is calculated by dividing the number of citations received in the current year by the number of papers published in the journal in the previous two calendar years. This concept was first proposed in 1927 by Gross and Gross and developed in 1955 by Garfield, with the idea of identifying the most relevant journals in an area of study. This formula, which emerged as a way of removing bias to rank journals in a subjective way, has undergone significant changes over the last century, but remains a popular metric.

How is Journal Impact Factor calculated?

This metric divides the number of citations from one year by the number of articles published over the past two years. For example:

The (fictional) journal TMU Library Times (TMULT) published 22 eligible (i.e citable) articles in 2021 and 19 eligible articles in 2022. In 2023, these articles received 245 citations from other publications.

To calculate the JIF for 2023, you would divide the 245 citations by the 41 publications over the previous two years, which equals 5.97. Thus, we can state that TMULT's JIF for 2023 is 5.97, as the articles published were cited on average 5.97 times.

Areas of caution for Journal Impact Factor

• Importantly: the JIF only includes papers indexed in the Web of Science database, including the citing papers, so the numbers must be considered with that in mind. As such, it excludes journals covered by the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, because their citation patterns are different.
• JIF can be skewed by the number of journals published in a discipline, so it is important to take this into account when making comparisons.
• The coverage for Journal Citation Reports is limited by factors like geography and language, which makes it not representative of the global conversation. Most journals are in English and from the developed world, although the Emerging Sources Citation Index is an effort to address that.
• The average relies on a two-year window, which is not a true representative of a journal's influence.
• Other factors such as publication type and journal size will alter the citation numbers, which heavily disadvantages certain fields, such as the arts and humanities.
• Average citation rates are attractive but it leverages a few highly-cited papers to make up for sparsely cited papers elsewhere, so outlier articles can make a major impact.
• It can also be misused as indication of article or author impact.

Journal Impact Factors may be manipulated, through a number of strategies:

• Increased number of review articles: review articles tend to be more highly cited, so journals with large proportions of review articles will influence their JIF.
• Increased front-matter: as a rule, journals with more front matter are able to develop higher Impact Factors, because these short pieces skew the averages and are more readily cited.
• Coercive citations and omitted citations: citations may be manipulated in the editorial stage to ensure control of the JIF; this can also include practices of citing papers within one's own journal, known as citation stacking. 
• Increased number of articles and eliminated non-citable items: The JIF has been known to shape content choices, and it can result in exclusionary practices based on predictions of how well a paper will be cited.
• Artificial manipulation of acceptance patterns, which can include long publication queues along with a preference for publication of papers likely to be highly cited early in the year

Works Cited

Garfield E. The history and meaning of the journal impact factor. JAMA. 2006;295(1):90–3. 10.1001/jama.295.1.90

Gross PL, Gross EM. College Libraries and Chemical Education. Science. 1927;66(1713):385–9. 10.1126/science.66.1713.385.

 Eigenfactor is a journal-level metric developed in 2008 by Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom, that determines the total importance of a scientific journal in relation to a much broader network of connections. 

Features of Eigenfactor include:

• an ability to use scores and citations across a broad range of networks to rank journals
• factoring of journal prices and cost effectiveness of journals
• adjustment for cross-disciplinary differences
• use of a five-year set of citation data, rather than two years
• freely available metrics

Source

To search Eigenfactor scores, visit the link listed below.

Works cited

Bergstrom, C. T.; West, J. D.; Wiseman, M. A. (2008). "The Eigenfactor Metrics". Journal of Neuroscience. 28 (45): 11433–11434. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0003-08.2008.

Google Scholar Metrics are a user-friendly approach to journal rankings, and collates citation data to allow researchers quick and easy access to how their research is performing in the field.

In addition to personal metrics, researchers can arrange searches by journal title, which includes the h5-index and h5-median scores. The h5-index summarises the h-index for articles published in the last 5 complete years, while the h5-median for a publication is the median number of citations for the articles that make up its h5-index.

You can sort the results on the page by the top 100 publications under each category, and filter by subcategory and language to discover the journal that is best for your publication.

The SCImago (from SCientific Influence and pronounced sigh-mago) Journal Rank (SJR) is a journal ranking based on Scopus data, that is calculated by dividing the number of citations received by the journal in the given year from primary items (articles, reviews and conference papers) to primary items published in the three previous years by the number of primary items published in the journal in the three previous years.

Benefits to this ranking include:

• It includes Journals that are not featured in other databases or rankings
• It has an increasing number of Open Access journals
• It features a strong component of social sciences
• Collates its own ranking (SJR) but incorporates measures including h-index
• Searchable by journal title, country, and language among other modifiers

To explore SCImago, click the link below.