Major enhancement to Journal Citation Reports

clare Databases, JCR

Additional useful metrics have been added to Journal Citation Reports in their recent update. (Reminder of what the Journal Citation Reports are).

 

New metrics added:

 

  • 5 year Impact Factor: considered a better measure for journals in slower moving areas (traditional Impact Factors are based on 2 years of data).

 

  • Summary Rank in Category: displays journal ranking across multiple subject categories.  Showing ranking across categories provides a broader context to the Impact Factors.

 

  • Box Plots displays by Category: displays box plots of impact factors for each subject category a journal appears in – this graphically shows the dispersion of impacts.

 

  • Integration of Eigen Factor Score and Article Influence: rather than just considering all journals that cite articles to be of equal weight, these measures give more weight if citations are made by more “influential” journals. 

 

  • Analyses of Journal Self Cites: displays the contribution of journal self cites to impact factor calculations – this helps identify journals with a narrow focus.  Tables show how many of a journal’s cites are self cites and the percent that contribute to the Impact Factor calculation.

 

 

Many of these metrics can seem rather complicated until you see some examples: the 9 minute narrated training session created by Thomson Reuters is very helpful, see: https://www.brainshark.com/brainshark/vu/view.asp?pi=737242501

 

 

To access the Journal Citation Reports, logon to the University Portal, and select Journal Citation Reports from the “A-Z list of online resources”, then from the Web of Knowledge gateway choose the “Select a Database” tab. 

 

 

Clare Allan

Subject Librarian