The Impact Factor can be a very valuable metric—but it can also be misused and viewed in the wrong context. A significant enhancement to Journal Citation Reports (JCR) offers new metrics and data that complement the Impact Factor, and helps users more fully understand their journals’ place in the scholarly world.
Librarians have long relied on Journal Citation Reports (JCR) to evaluate their journal collections. JCR now delivers a wider context for this evaluation—and assures that the Impact Factor is not used in isolation from other metrics, resulting in a limited picture of journal performance. New metrics depict a more precise view of journal citation results, from a broader range of scholarly disciplines in farther-reaching contexts.
Expanded analytical capabilities include:
- Five-year Impact Factor Trend Graph: View a longer time span to see a broader range of citation activity and get a more informative snapshot over time. For journals in subjects where citation activity continues to rise through several years, this allows more of their total citation activity to be included in a critical performance metric.
- Eigenfactor: Discover the metric that uses citing journal data from the entire JCR file to reflect the prestige and citation influence of a journal by considering scholarly literature as a network of journal-to-journal relationships
- Impact Factor boxplots: Visualize Impact Factor by journal category
- Rank-in-Category Tables: Evaluate journals in the context of multiple categories.
- Journal Self-Citations: See how self-citations affect Impact Factor
More information on the Impact Factor and Eigenfactor! New types of journal metrics grow more influential in the scientific community.
