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Scholarship Impact Metrics

Introduction to scholarship impact metrics and the ways to increase the overall impact.

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Journals Metrics & Rankings

There are many types of journals metrics that take in consideration data coming from two  sources.

 

  1. Web of Science, index database including more than 11,000 journals, published by Clarivate Analytics.

  1. Scopus, index database including over 22,000 journals, published by Elsevier.

Additionally, Google Scholar metrics ranks the top 100 publications in several languages, ordered by their five-year h-index and h-median metrics. Journal ranking within the research areas and subcategories is also available but only for the English publications.

Journal Impact Factor

Impact factor is the number of citations made in the current year to articles in the previous 2 years, divided by the total number of citable articles from the previous 2 years.

Where to find Journal Impact Factor?

Other journal metrics available in JCR are:

  • 5-Year Journal Impact Factor, shows how much a journal was cited during the most recent five full years
    Citations to articles from the most recent five full years, divided by the total number of articles from the most recent five full years. 
  • Journal Immediacy Index, shows how much a journal is being cited during the current year
    Citations to articles from the current year, divided by the total number of articles from the current year.  
  • Journal Cited Half-Life
    For the current Journal Citation Reports year, the median age of journal articles cited.  "What is the duration of citation to articles in this journal?" 

Important readings about journal impact factor

The journal impact factor was designed to help librarians decide which journals to subscribe to and was never intended as a measure of scholars' value. Cons for being used in scholars' evaluation include: scholars' work impact may extend beyond the published articles, dependency on the subject, easy to manipulate, and dependency on the source database.

Although outside its scope,  journal impact factor became part of scholars' evaluation criteria in many cases. Consequently, there is growing concern on the extent of this practice and growing support for its demise as a scholars' evaluation criteria.

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