|
a) |
How to find a Journal’s Impact Factor (JIF) in JCR
To find a journal’s impact factor in JCR, you can follow the few steps below: |
|
|
i) |
When you are in the Journal Citation Reports database page, search a journal by keying in the journal title as shown in Fig. 1.
 |
|
|
ii) |
You will get the journal’s citation report as shown in Fig. 2 below. You can see how the JIF was calculated as highlighted in the red box.
 |
|
|
iii) |
Or you can click “Browse by Journal” to get the list of journal titles ranked by Journal Impact Factor as shown in Fig. 3, with each journal’s impact factor and Eigenfactor Score presented in the red box below.
 |
|
|
iv) |
Click on the individual title to view the journal citation report including other influence metrics such as Article Influence Score and Normalized Eigenfactor as shown in Fig. 4.
|
|
b) |
Relative analysis of JIF in a discipline
There is a common argument that choosing a journal based only on its JIF is not the best way to go. In some core subject areas, where the number of researchers is low, JIF will also be low. It is therefore important to note that when evaluating journals, the impact factors of journals should not be compared across different disciplines. To do a relative analysis of JIF in a special subject area, you can do it using JCR as below: |
|
|
i) |
From JCR homepage, select “browse by category”, the “Category Ranking” page is shown in Fig. 5, all journal categories are ranked by number of journals. You can select a specific category by following steps 1, 2 and 3. The result will be shown in Fig. 6.
 |
|
|
ii) |
In the specific category page, you will get a few indicators of this category, such as the median impact factor and the aggregate impact factor. You can click the category name to see the details.
 |
|
|
iii) |
In the individual category page as in Fig. 7, you will see the number of journals under the “Cell Biology” category by year, and other indicators such as median impact factor by year, which will help you understand the “middle” impact factor of indexed journals in this field in this year. You can use this indicator to orient your selected journal in relation to the field.
 |
|
|
iv) |
Clicking on the number under “# Journals” will bring you to the list of journals under this category in a specific year as shown in Fig. 8. The list will also show the individual Journal Impact Factor. For example, the journal Cancer Cell’s JIF is 23.916 as highlighted in the box. Comparing with the median impact factor of 3.485 in this category, you will be able to tell where your targeted journal is in this field, and whether it is suitable for your paper or not. Or you can also use the list to shortlist the journals you want to send your paper to. To know more about this journal, you can click the journal title to view the full journal profile.
 |
