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Publication Metrics: Web of Science + JCR

Information in Web of Science

Web of Science provides detailed information about the journals it indexes, including those titles that are Open Access. Among the types of data included for a source are the following:

  1. Journal Impact Factor: The impact factor is a measurement of journal reach and impact. It is used to rank journals by their importance relative to other journals in the field. The 5 Year Impact Factor is also provided.
  2. Eigenfactor Score: measures a journal's importance to the scientific community .
  3. Article Influence Score: measures the average influence of individual articles in a journal.
  4. Times and Percentages of documents cited: in InCites.
  5. Reports by researcher or organization: in InCites
  6. Essential Science Indicators: important papers by field, author, institution, country or region, and research fronts.
  7. h-index and other author metrics: in Publons.

Journal Impact Factor in JCR

To find out publication information on a journal, choose Journal Citation Reports from the top Web of Science Menu.

Web of Science menu

You can than search for a particular journal or browse by journal or category. The JCR search screen allows researchers to view journals by rank, view categories by rank, or create custom reports. You need to be logged in to access some of the custom features of JCR, such as customizing indicators on the results page.

JCR Landing Page

JCR landing page

All Journals Ranked by Impact Factor

JCR ranking of all titles by impact factor

Categories Ranked

Categories as well as journals can be ranked by a variety of indicators, including the number of journals in the field, the number of articles, the total number of citations to journals in that field, and the median and aggregate impact factors of journals in the field.

This example is simply all Web of Science categories ranked by the number of journals in the field; however, you can choose specific categories and look at only those.

JCR ranking of categories by number of journals

Journal Data

The landing page for a journal in Web of Science provides a variety of data about that journal, including:

  1. Basic publication information such as ISSN, publisher, and abbreviations used
  2. Journal impact factor
  3. Journal impact factor  trends
  4. Citation distribution
  5. Key indicators, such as total cites, 5 year impact factor, immediacy index, Eigenfactor score, and average journal impact factor percentile

Web of Science Journal landing page

Comparing Journals

Web of Science allows users to compare the metrics for journal titles using Journal Citations Reports. To do that, go to Journal Citation Reports, choose Browse by Journal, then choose Compare Journals.

JCR Comparing Journals from browse screen

Choose the comparison you want to make -- Quartile or Trends, click on Select Journals, then search for the journals you are interested in. These will be added to the box below. Click on the titles in the box to select them, choose the reporting year you are interested in from the drop down menu (you can choose multiple years for the Trends report but not for the Quartile report), then choose the metrics you want to use to compare journals (you can choose multiple metrics for the Quartile report but not for the Trends report.)

JCR journal comparison options

Trends Report Example

JCR Trends Report example

 

Training for Web of Science

Here are some training resources that are helpful in learning to use Web of Science and the accompanying Journal Citation Reports and Incites & Benchmarking.