Measure your Research Performance

The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) measures how often articles from a particular journal have been cited recently. This can be used to help evaluate importance or prestige of a journal.

How is it calculated?
For the Clarivate Analytics Journal Citation Reports tool, the Impact Factor is the average number of times articles from that journal published in the last two years have been cited in the current year.

Example from JCR (the Journal of Management) below. This journal's impact factor is 6.071, meaning on average articles in the journal from the previous two years have been cited just over 6 times.

1. Go to Journal Citation Reports (on the Incites platform).

2. Search for the journal name in the Journal Profile box.

3. Click on the journal title. See the latest Journal Impact Factors in a table next to the years. What does this mean? See below for comparing journals.

• The Journal Citation Reports tool does not cover all journals.
• Potential issues around journal self-citation (JCR includes another table entry without self-citations).
• Certain types of articles, such as reviews, may be more heavily cited than others.
• Journal impact factors will depend on the particular field, so cannot be compared from subject to subject.
• Smaller, more specialised journals tend to have higher impact factors.

Different metrics based on the Scopus citation database. NB. Edinburgh Napier has no access to Scopus.

CiteScore (Elsevier)  -  total number of indexed citations in Scopus database (articles, reviews, conference papers, book chapters, and data papers) from last 4 years divided by the number of publications published by a journal over the same 4‐year period.

SCImago SJR - Ranking indicates mean number of weighted citations received during a selected year per paper published in that journal during the previous 3 years. SJR accounts for both total citation numbers and prestige of the journal, ie it considers citations in some journals to be more influential than others.

SNIP - measures the average citation impact and corrects for differences in citation patterns between subject areas (not taken into account by JIF). 

Web of Science. The Clarivate Analytics Impact Factor. 

Garfield, E. (2006). The history and meaning of the journal impact factor. JAMA-Journal of the American Medical Association, 295(1), 90-93.

Seglen, P.O. (1997). Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research. British Medical Journal 314, 498502.