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Faculty Publishing Guide

Impact Factor

What is an impact factor?

 

A  journal's impact factor is a numerical score derived by measuring how often its articles were cited in a specific time window - typically two or five years.
 

  • The idea is that the more its contents are cited during the time window, the more influential the journal.
     
  • The impact factor is a major criterion for determining how academic journals -  outside of Arts & Humanities -  are ranked for quality and reputation.

Arts & Humanities

Impact Factors and Arts & Humanities

 

The impact factor is not relevant for every discipline:
 

  • In general, Arts & Humanities research has a longer submission-to-publication timeline and different citation patterns from research in STEM disciplines and the Social Sciences. 
     
  • Articles typically begin garnering citations well after the publication date - and may continue to do so for years afterwards.
     
  • Thus, citation counts - especially from a two year time window  - are not useful criteria for evaluating journals in Arts/Humanities, and these disciplines are not included in Annual Review's Journal Impact Factors.

 

Arts/Humanities-Specific Rankings:
 

 

Other Measures of Quality

 

  • selectivity/article acceptance rates, e.g., does it seemingly accept more content than is compatible with quality editorial processes?
     
  • circulation figures - especially how widely it's collected by academic libraries.  This may not be useful for newer journals, e.g., those which have been publishing for fewer than 5 years.
     
    • You can do this by searching for the journal title in WorldCat.  If there's a "View all formats and languages" link click that to see all the different formats in which the journal may be available, e.g., microform, print, online etc.
       
  • is it peer-reviewed?
     
  • the stature of the editorial board members, e.g.,  active researchers themselves / well respected?
     
  • how long it's been in circulation - while unhelpful for assessing new journals, a long publication run does indicate consistent demand.
     
  • if it's indexed in the major academic databases - though be aware - most have stringent criteria for accepting new journals and the process can take several years.
     

 

Periodical Directories

 

  • DOAJ: "is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals."
     
  • ERIH Plus - European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences: "is an academic journal index for the HSS (Humanities and Social Sciences) society in Europe." Covers over 10,000 European journals, (including UK titles) that have met ERIH PLUS minimum criteria for quality.
     
  • MLA Directory of Periodicals: "provides detailed information on over 25,000 journals...that cover literature, literary theory, dramatic arts, folklore, language, linguistics, pedagogy, rhetoric and composition, and the history of printing and publishing."

Impact Factors / Other Rankings

Finding Impact Factors & Other Rankings

 

Scimago: free portal providing various metrics based on data from Elsevier's Scopus® database.   Covers STEM, Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities journals from disciplines including literature, history, philosophy, visual & performing arts, and religious studies.

Ranks & metrics provided include:

  • SJR (Scimago Journal Rank) indicator: "expresses the average number of weighted citations received in the selected year by the documents published in the selected journal in the three previous years."
     
  • H-Index: "expresses the journal's number of articles (h) that have received at least h citations."
     
  • Quartiles: Also provides rankings within disciplinary categories; Q1 journals are the highest ranked, down through to Q4 for the lowest.
     

For a detailed explanation of its metrics and data visualization tools see the Scimago guide to Understanding indicators, tables and charts.

 

Journal Impact Factors: from Annual Reviews, provides access to the latest edition of the Journal Citation Reports published by Clarivate Analytics - providing impact factors and quartile rankings for journals in science, technology and social sciences. 

  • Quartile rankings: journals for each disciplinary category are divided into four groups, from highest to lowest ranked.  Q1 journals are the top-ranked in their category down through to Q4 for the lowest ranked journals.
     

Google Scholar Top Publications: Revised annually, covering the most recent five years.  Limited to journals indexed in Google Scholar, "from websites that follow our inclusion guidelines, and selected conferences in Engineering & Computer Science" (Google Scholar. ).

 

Ranks provided are the h5-index and the h5-median:

  • The h5-index comprises the h-index of a publication's articles from the last five complete calendar years.
     
  • The h-index "is the largest number h such that at least h articles in that publication were cited at least h times each."
     
  • The h5-median is the median of the citation counts in a set of top cited articles from the publication (Google Scholar. Metrics).

 

Journal / Publisher sites:

 

Many large publishers and/or individual journals will publicly include their rankings on their websites, for example: