Impact Factors: Citation Ranking

The impact factor (IF) 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.

The calculation is based on a two-year period and involves dividing the number of times articles were cited by the number of articles that are citable.

You can search for journal rankings in large, subject specific databases.  UML does not subscribe to Web of Science or Scopus, which rank publications in the sciences.  UML faculty can have access to these databases through other Universities affiliated under the Boston Library Consortium.

To get a Boston Library Consortium card go to the circulation desk at either O'Leary or Lydon Libraries.

UML Library subscribes to Dimensions, a linked research data platform, designed to provide knowledge about what is going on in your research area, and how this is changing over time.

Dimensions does not include journal impact factors, but instead uses article-level metrics. Publication citations' refers to the number of times that a publication has been cited by other publications in the Dimensions database.

While we don’t subscribe to the Web or Science or their Journal Citation Reports, here is a list of a few alternative sources for journal impact factors.

•  Try variant forms of the author's name, such as first name spelled out, with and without middle initial, with initial for first name, first name spelled out, etc.
•  If the first author's name is a common name and there is a co-author, try combining the first author's name with or more of the co-authors' surnames, preferably ones that are not common.
•  If the author's last name is common, try combining the author's name with the name of the publication. Try variations of the publication name, e.g. Journal of Applied Polymer Science, J. Poly. Appl.  Sci.,  J. Polym. Appl.  Sci.,  etc.
•  When you have a choice of searching in the full text or the references field, search in the references field.   
•  Consider limiting by time period; it doesn't make sense to search for citing references in a time period before the original article was written.