Evaluating Journal Quality - AHS 452 - Applied Physiology

Why do we need to evaluate journal quality?

Assessing the academic quality of a particular journal or article is important. It can:

Help you determine the scholary worth and relevance to your research.
Affect where you choose to publish your own research.

The JCR "impact factor" historically has been the main factor used to judge the relative importance of a journal in its field. However, because the index is based on only publications indexed in Web of Science the validity of this measurement is being disputed particularly in non-scientific fields and we are now seeing the other "impact" factors being published.

What is the Journal Citation Reports "Impact factor?"

Using works indexed in the Web of Science, the JCR Journal Impact Factor is the average number of times articles from a journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year. For example:

An Impact Factor of 1.0 means that, on average, the articles published in a journal one or two year ago have been cited one time.
An Impact Factor of 2.5 means that, on average, the articles published one or two year ago have been cited two and a half times.

(from the Thomas Reuters site http://admin-apps.webofknowledge.com/JCR/help/h_impfact.htm)

Evaluating "impact"

How do I find a journal's "impact" factor?

Search for the published "impact" factor(s).

Use the links below to find different "impact" factors for a journal, including the JRC Journal Impact Factor.
Go to the journal's web site. Many journals publish their impact factors on their web site.

Are there other ways to evaluate "impact?"

Since one of the main criteria for calulating "impact" is the number of times articles from a journal are cited.

Search for your article in the Science Citation Index or Google Scholar to find the number of times it has been cited giving you a sense of the article's relative importance.

Eigen Factor
Contains citation data from Thomson Scientific's Journal Citation Reports (JCR). Ranking based on the incoming citations for a journal with more weight given to citations coming from significant journals.
Google Scholar Metrics
Scholar Metrics summarize recent citations to many publications.
Microsoft Academic Search
1. Default display is "all journals"
2. Select a discipline.
3. Select a sub-discipline if desired.
There does not appear to be a way to search for a specific journal title to see where it is ranked.
Scopus CiteScore Metrics
Rankings for journals indexed in the Scopus database.
SJR Journal Rankings
A measure of influence of scholarly journals that accounts for both the number of citations received by a journal and the prestige of the journals where such citations come from. Factors considered include: H-index, Total cites per journal, Total of published documents per journal, Cites per document.

Publish or Perish

Publish or Perish is a a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search and provides a variety of metrics.

For more informaion: http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm

Download software for Windows:
- http://www.harzing.com/pop_win.htm
To use on a MAC you will need to have a virtual machine or an app-builder using Wine.
- For more information: http://www.harzing.com/pop_osx.htm