Citations are the "coin of the realm" for researchers who want to communicate the scholarly impact of their work.
Here are some things to keep in mind when using citations to document the impact of your research (or when evaluating others' work based on citation counts):
Scholars may publish journal articles that assess and evaluate the top-ranked journals in their field. Search for these articles through EBSCOhost's Academic Search Complete using keywords (such as "top journals" or "highly ranked journals") or subject headings (such as "IMPACT factor (Citation analysis)" or "BIBLIOMETRICS") and the field. For example, you could search in Academic Search Premier using the terms "top ranked journals" and "economics". You can also select a narrower subject specific database (find these on our Subject Guides). Alternatively search across a number of different databases by using Search@UW or for full-text articles using the Google Scholar.
Often, publishers use their own system for measuring journal impact. Each major publisher uses a mix of standard and homegrown measurement techniques.
Journal metrics identify popular journals in a given research field. This identification may be most useful to scholars who are compiling a current reading list or who are locating journals in which to submit future publications.
Journal Impact Factor
The journal impact factor (JIF) is a proprietary metric compiled annually by Thomson Reuters. It's a journal-level measure that reports the average number of citations an article published in a particular journal can expect to receive.
The JIF is calculated by dividing X (the total number of citations received by any articles published in a two-year period in a particular journal) by Y (the total number of articles published in that journal during the same two-year period).
The JIF was originally created to help librarians determine the usefulness of particular journals when evaluating them for collection development purposes. But it's been misused in recent years by researchers and university administrators who use the measure as a stand-in for the quality of a journal (wrongly assuming that a higher JIF signals more quality).
Scholarly communication has changed much since the 1950s. Newer measures of impact are described on the altmetrics/other metrics tab and provide alternate ways to evaluate the scholarly impact of journal articles.
This is another free metric for measuring journal impact derived from Elsevier's Scopus resource UWL does not have a subscription to Scopus). The calculation of CiteScore for the "x" year is based on the number of citations received by a journal in that year for the documents published in the journal in the past three years, divided by the documents indexed in Scopus published in those three years.CiteScore.