Faculty/Staff: Tips from the Library

To provide evidence of the quality and "significance" of a journal in which you have published, consider the following methods and tools for finding evaluative measures such as a journal's impact factor, acceptance rate, etc.

Note that there are entire bodies of literature arguing over the value, strengths, and weaknesses of the various measures of significance. These measures do not address the value of any individual article published within a journal.

• Journal Citation Reports (JCR)  is part of the Library’s subscription to Web of Knowledge databases and provides “journal impact factor,” one measure of a journal’s quality/prestige based on how heavily cited it is in other journals. When an impact factor is available for a journal in which you've published, it can be one factor in establishing the quality of the publication venue. After linking to JCR, choose “Sciences” or “Social Sciences” and then search for a specific journal title or view a group of journals by subject category, publisher, or country/territory. JCR provides data on about 7,000 journals in the sciences and social sciences.  Login with library ID and password is required when off of the Madison campus.

• Eigenfactor.org develops measures of journal influence. The Eigenfactor score for a journal measures its "total importance to the scientific community" The Article Influence score of a journal measures "the average influence of each of its articles over the first five years after publication." Use the eigenfactor search to find the scores for a specific journal or for journals in a specific discipline. The measures are based on Journal Citation Reports data; "to be listed on the website, a journal either must be listed in the JCR or, minimally, be cited in the last 5 years by some journal that is listed in the JCR."

• SCImago Journal and Country Rank. Find journal ranks in this "portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.)."

• Cabell’s Directories of Journals provide acceptance rate and other information for evaluating a journals in Computer Science, Health Administration, Business (accounting, econ and finance, management, and marketing) and education (curriculum & methods, psychology and administration, and technology and library science). Provides acceptance rates, type of review (blind or editorial), number of reviewers, and more. All journal acceptance rates and review procedures are self-reported by the journals, so no journal should be selected for publication without evaluating its articles for scholarly value, etc. Login with library ID and password is required when off of the Madison campus. Login with library ID and password is required when off of the Madison campus.

• Journal websites.  Reputable journals will describe their submission review processes on their websites, typically in their “submission guidelines” area. All journal acceptance rates and review procedures are self-reported by the journals so have the potential of being manipulated

To establish the significance of your articles, books, conference proceedings, etc., consider the following methods and tools for finding who has cited your work. You may need to use all of the tools in order to compile a complete list. Finding out who has cited your work and where your work has been cited will provide quantitative measures in terms of number of times cited and in terms of longevity (i.e, the number of years that a work continues to be cited).

• Google Scholar. Search Google Scholar for each of your articles or conference presentations to identify where each has been cited. When the full text or pdf of the citing document is not accessible on the web, you'll need to verify that it is actually citing your work.

• Web of Knowledge citation indexes where you can search for those who have cited your work.

• Google Scholar Citations "provides a simple way for authors to keep track of citations to their articles. You can check who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can also make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name."

• Full text searches of research databases. Another method for finding who has cited your works... Go to the research databases that cover your discipline, including general databases that cover all disciplines (for example, search all Ebscohost databases and all Proquest databases). Search for your articles, books, conference papers, etc. Be sure to select the search option for searching full text of articles so that the references/bibliographies of others' articles are being searched.

• Altrimetric resources. Altimetrics is the study of new metrics based on the social web. Resources for altimetrics include: Altmetrics.org, and Publish or Perish.  For more, see Altimetrics Bibliography by Charles Bailey, Jr.