Impact Factors
- astatistical measure of a journal's influence and impact on the global research community
- often used as a factor in deciding allocations of public funding for research
- journals may be referred to as "high-impact", based on their impact factor ranking
- should be viewed and interpreted cautiously, and for individual journal titles relative to other titles within the discipline, rather than in isolation
Use Impact Factors to
- identify highly ranked journals to read and in which to publish
- confirm the status of journals in which you have published
- identify journals relevant to your research
External Links
- ERA Performance Indicators
- ERA Journal Lists Journals ranked by the ARC for Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) assessments.
Measuring Journal Impact
The traditional source of impact factors is Thomson ISI's Journal Citation Reports (JCR)
Impact Factor (IF) =
the average number of times that articles published in a specific journal in the two previous years (e.g. 2000-01) were cited in a particular year (i.e. 2002)
Impact Factors may be obtained for individual journals or for all journals within a subject category or edition within the Journal Citation Reports
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JCR's Science edition includes over 5900 journals
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JCR's Social Science edition includes over 1700 journals
A relatively new, free source of journal impact data is SCImago Journal & Country Rank
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Covers the 16,000+ titles indexed by Scopus and reflects its subject coverage:
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Life Sciences >3,400 titles
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Health Sciences > 5,300 titles (including 100% coverage of Medline titles)
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Physical Sciences > 5,500 titles
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Social Sciences > 2,850 titles
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Coverage period of country and journal indicators is 1996 - 2007, inclusive
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SCImago Algorithm is based on Google PageRank
Other sources of impact data
The Eigenfactor offers a free alternative to journal ranking, based on the network created by citations and footnotes. The Eigenfactor score of a journal is an estimate of the probability of a library user accessing that journal by following references.
Read about how impact measures compare:
- A Principal Component Analysis of 39 Scientific Impact Measures
The impact of scientific publications has traditionally been expressed in terms of citation counts. However, scientific activity has moved online over the past decade. To better capture scientific impact in the digital era, a variety of new impact measures has been proposed on the basis of social network analysis and usage log data. Here we investigate how these new measures relate to each other, and how accurately and completely they express scientific impact. - SCImago – a new source of journal metrics offering a wealth of free data on open access journals Compares journal rankings for biomedical journals, using Journal Citation Reports and SciMago.
Peer-Reviewed Journals
Searching on keywords in databases listed in your Subject Guides will identify scholarly journals that publish articles relevant to your research. Other peer-reviewed journals for reading and/or publishing may be identified from these sources:
- Ulrich's Periodicals Directory A directory of journals within broad subject areas and specific disciplines, identifying peer-reviewed sources.
- DEST Register of Refereed Journals This list, although no longer maintained, contains the names of journals that have been assessed by the Department of Education, Science and Training as satisfying the refereeing requirements for the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC).
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