Beyond the Impact Factor: JCR enhancements

Journal Citation Report (JCR)

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.

Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics: Open Access Journal

The Open Access Journal of "Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics" provides a global stage for presenting, discussing and developing issues concerning ethics in science, environmental politics, and ecological and economic ethics. This journal can be accessed also through A-to-Z List.

The 2008, Vol. 8(1) is dedicated to The use and misuse of bibliometric indices in evaluating scholarly performance.

Quantifying the relative performance of individual scholars, groups of scholars, departments, institutions, provinces/states/regions and countries has become an integral part of decision-making over research policy, funding allocations, awarding of grants, faculty hirings, and claims for promotion and tenure. Bibliometric indices (based mainly upon citation counts), such as the h-index and the journal impact factor, are heavily relied upon in such assessments. There is a growing consensus, and a deep concern, that these indices — more-and-more often used as a replacement for the informed judgement of peers — are misunderstood and are, therefore, often misinterpreted and misused.

The articles in this Theme Section present a range of perspectives on these issues. Alternative approaches, tools and metrics that will hopefully lead to a more balanced role for these instruments are presented.
Vol. 8(1)

* Browman HI, Stergiou KIINTRODUCTION: Factors and indices are one thing, deciding who is scholarly, why they are scholarly, and the relative value of their scholarship is something else entirely

* Campbell P.: Escape from the impact factor

* Lawrence PA.: Lost in publication: how measurement harms science

* Todd PA, Ladle RJ.: Hidden dangers of a ‘citation culture’

* Taylor M, Perakakis P, Trachana V.: The siege of science

* Cheung WWL.: The economics of post-doc publishing

* Tsikliras AC.: Chasing after the high impact

* Zitt M, Bassecoulard E.: Challenges for scientometric indicators: data demining, knowledge flows measurements and diversity issues

* Harzing AWK, van der Wal R.: Google Scholar as a new source for citation analysis

* Pauly D, Stergiou KI.: Re-interpretation of ‘influence weight’ as a citation-based Index of New Knowledge (INK)

* Giske J.: Benefitting from bibliometry

* Butler L.: Using a balanced approach to bibliometrics: quantitative performance measures in the Australian Research Quality Framework

* Bornmann L, Mutz R, Neuhaus C, Daniel HD.: Citation counts for research evaluation: standards of good practice for analyzing bibliometric data and presenting and interpreting results

* Harnad S.: Validating research performance metrics against peer rankings

Have a look at the previous years publications:

2007: Vol. 7

Articles on: Climate Change; Urban sprawl; Ramsey Model for Climate Change Assessment
2006: Vol. 6

Articles on: Environmental Assessment in Chile; Environmental Ethics for Global Warming
2005: Vol. 5

Articles on: Ecological crisis; sustainability ethics; Results from two citation analysis - ISI and Scholar Google

Essential Science Indicators

In "Essential Science Indicators" website you will find the latest comments & interviews from the authors of the "Hot Papers"- January 2008. Some of the topics are on Environment/Ecology, Physics, Molecular Biology & Genetics, Mathematics, Computer Science & Agricultural Science.

You can also view the "Fast Breaking Papers" from December 2007 in Geosciences, Immunology, Microbiology, Biology & Biochemistry, etc.

Select from a list the available "Archived Special Topics", with information on Hot Papers, Top Authors, Top Institutions, Top Nations, Top Journals over 10 years period: Air Pollution (2005); Artificial Neural Networks (Dec 2007); Assymetric Catalysis (Jan 2006); Comets (Feb 2005); Coral Reef Ecology (Sep 2004); Earthquakes (Sep 2003); Global Warming (Sep 2006); Microfluidic Devices (Sep 2007); Nanocrystals (Mar 2007); Solar Cells (May 2007); Volcanoes (Dec 2004)

Read about "Fast Moving Fronts" - January 2008 and "Emerging Research Fronts" - December 2007

This site will be useful to all, for keeping you informed about the latest and past research in your areas.

Show me the Data: Impact Factor

The article "Show me the Data" in The Journal of Cell Biology, Vol. 179, no. 6, Dec 2007 the authers' discussed the impact factor data that are gathered and sold by Thomson Scientific (formerly the Institute of Scientific Information, or ISI) and which have a strong influence on the scientific community, affecting decisions on where to publish, whom to promote or hire (1), the success of grant applications (2), and even salary bonuses (3).

The impact factor for a journal in a particular year is declared to be a measure of the average number of times a paper published in the previous two years was cited during the year in question. For example, the 2006 impact factor is the average number of times a paper published in 2004 or 2005 was cited in 2006. There are, however, some quirks about impact factor calculations that have been pointed out by others....

Click on the TITLE to read the 2 pages article.

Reliability of Journal Impact Factor Rankings

BMC Medical Research Methodology 2007, 7:48 (for provisional full-text - click on the titile)

Journal impact factors and their ranks are used widely by journals, researchers, and research assessment exercises.Decisions placed on journal impact factors are potentially misleading where the uncertainty associated with the measure is ignored. This article proposes that caution should be exercised in the interpretation of journal impact factors and their ranks, and specifically that a measure of uncertainty should be routinely presented alongside the point estimate.

Published: 15 November 2007

ISI Journal Citation Reports: South African Journals Impact Factors

According to the 2006 ISI Journal Citation Reports, only 17 South African Journals are accredited internationally. Look at the Sciences Journals Impact Factors:

* African Journal of Marine Science (1.086)

* South African Journal of Geology (1.000)

* South African Journal of Botany (0.648)

* African entomology (0.613)

* South African Journal of Science (0.602)

* Water SA (0.494)

* South African Journal of Wildlife Research (0.488)

* South African Journal of Chemistry (0.459)

* African Zoology (0.408)

* Bothalia (0.407)

* Ostrich (0.256)

* South African Journal of Animal Science (0.215)
* J S AFR I MIN METAL (0.124)

Click on the Table to enlarge image. You will also find out what are the: Total Cites, Immediacy Index, Articles and Cited half-life indicators.

P.S. ISI Journal Citation Report is available through the Library Databases list. Direct link is also available on this website.