Faculty Toolkit for Publishing

The research tool Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is a tool that allows you to evaluate and compare journal impact factors using citation data, as well as review journal titles and key performance indicators in categories of academic disciplines.  JCR can be accessed individually or through the library's Web of Science database.

1. Go to Journal Citation Reports
2. Once in Journal Citation Reports, search for a journal (or browse by journal or category)
   
   
    
3. On the journal profile page, scroll down to the Key Indicators box
4. Although the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is listed throughout the journal profile page, the "Key Indicators" box lists both the current JIF and 5-year impact factor, as well as other influence metrics such as Eigenfactor and Article Influence scores.
   
   
    

JCR only calculates citations for publications that are indexed by Web of Science and includes few journals from the Humanities. In addition, journals need to be in existence for at least 3 years before receiving its first impact factor which may be problematic for fast moving areas.

CiteScore is a simple way of measuring the citation impact of sources available in Scopus, such as journals, by simply averaging the number of citations per document that a title receives over a three-year period.  For more information about CiteScore, please see How are CiteScore Metrics used in Scopus?

1. Go to CiteScore
2. Once in CiteScore, search for a journal
   
   
    
3. On the result page you can view the CiteScore metric, as well as other journal metrics such as SNIP and SJR
   
   
    
4. Clicking on the journal title will bring you to the journal details page, where you can view the CiteScore, as well as CiteScore rank & trend, and CiteScore Tracker
   
   
    

CiteScore counts all documents listed in Scopus, including letters and editorials. Some in the scholarly community believe this can dilute results, but others believe all documents have the potential to attract citations and therefore should be included.

A freely accessible tool, Google Scholar Metrics, ranks journals by five-year h-indexes and h-median indexes in 9 different languages. You can sort by both broad categories and subcategories.

1. Go to Google Scholar Metrics
2. Select Categories and choose an academic discipline
3. To limit even further, select Subcategories


 

Google Scholar Metrics is limited to articles indexed in Google Scholar and will only display the top 20 journals for each subject category. Additionally, there is no historical data.