Journal Citation Reports are an immensely useful tool and can help you:
– identify journals with the greatest total cites and the highest impact in your field
– find the most appropriate and influential journals in which to publish
Each edition of Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is published annually following the year of coverage – and the latest 2012 edition has recently become available.
There are two different editions: the Science Edition covering more than 8,200 science journals, and the Social Sciences Edition, covering more than 2,900 social sciences journals.
Access and Searching
To access JCR, logon to the University Portal, and then from the “A-Z list of online resources” select Journal Citation Reports.
For information on how to use JCR see the Quick Reference Card and the web tutorial.
JCR is also integrated with Web of Science, so after a search on Web of Science when viewing an individual article record you can link directly to JCR to quickly check the source journal’s impact factor, and other metrics.
Metrics covered
- Total Cites: Tells you which journals are most frequently cited. Journals are ranked by the number of times they are cited in a given year; gives an indication of assessment of journals by scholars who have responded to the items published.
- Journal Impact Factor: The frequency with which the “average article” in a journal has been cited in a particular year. Helps evaluate a journal’s relative importance in a given field.
- Five-Year Impact Factor: Gives a broader range of citation activity for a more informative snapshot over time. For journals in subjects where citation activity continues to rise through several years, this allows more of their total citation activity to be included in a critical performance metric.
- Immediacy Index: A measure of how quickly the “average article” in a journal is cited. The Immediacy Index will tell you how often articles published in a journal are cited within the same year.
- Articles: Total number of articles published in the JCR year.
- Cited Half-life: The number of publication years from the current year which account for 50% of current citations received. This figure helps you evaluate the age of the majority of cited articles published in a journal
- Eigenfactor Metrics: Comprised of the Eigenfactor Score and Article Influence Score, are designed to reflect the prestige and citation influence of journals by considering scholarly literature as a network of journal-to-journal relationships. Eigenfactor Score is a measure of the journal’s total importance to the research community. Article Influence Score is a measure of the average influence of each of its articles over the first five years after publication. (Find out more at: http://www.eigenfactor.org/faq.php).
- Graphic Displays of Impact Factor “Box Plots”: A graphic interpretation of how a journal ranks in different categories.
- Rank-in-Category Tables for Journals Covering Multiple Disciplines: Allows a journal to be seen in the context of multiple categories at a glance rather than only a single category.
- Journal “Self Citations”: An analysis of journal self-citations and their contribution to the Journal Impact Factor calculation.
Clare Allan
Library Liaison and Development Team