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Measuring Your Impact: Journal Impact Factor

Overview of h-index, Eigenfactor, Impact Factor (IF), Journal Citation Reports, Citation Analysis, and other tools.

About Journal Impact Factor

The journal impact factor (JIF) is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year.  It is used to measure the importance or rank of a journal by calculating the times its articles are cited. Clarivate Analytics is the creator and only provide of the journal impact factor. Other publishers and companies have similar sounding  "impact factor" names or terms.

The normalized impact factor (NIF) was introduced by Clarivate Analytics as a method to enable better comparisons between disciplines in each field. It targets 54 disciplines in the biomedical field to assess validity and practical usage. 

Find the Journal Impact Factor

Use Journal Citation Reports (JCR) to find the impact factor of a journal.  

You can enter a journal title in the Search box under "Go to Journal Profile".  Because impact factors mean little on their own, it's best to view the journal you are interested in comparison to the other journals in the same category. To determine the impact factor for a particular journal, select a JCR edition (Science and/ or Social Science), year, and Categories, found on the left of the screen. Click Submit.  Scroll the list to find the journal you are interested in.

Contact the library if you have questions for trouble finding a journal in JCR.

Impact Factor Video

More Information

If you have more questions about metrics and assessment contact:

Charlotte Bhasin or Mario Scarcipino

If you have questions about databases or where to publish contact:

Michelle Kraft or Matt Weaver

Where To Publish

The library recommends using these aids to determine the best place to publish your research.

Other Journal Metrics

Eigenfactor

Eignenfactor scores can be found in the above listed Journal Citation Reports or at eigenfactor.org.  Journal Citation Reports or at eigenfactor.org. Eigenfactor scores are intended to give a measure of how likely a journal is to be used, and are thought to reflect how frequently an average researcher would access content from that journal. (Wikipedia)  (Find out more about the Eigenfactor) 
 

SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) (by Elsevier)

“The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.).” Scopus contains more than 15,000 journals from over 4,000 international publishers as well as over 1000 open access journals.  SCImago's "evaluation of scholarly journals is to assign weights to bibliographic citations based on the importance of the journals that issued them, so that citations issued by more important journals will be more valuable than those issued by less important ones." (SJR indicator)