Research Support

Defined by the Dictionary for Library and Information Science, Impact Factor (IF) is a quantitative measure of the frequency with which the "average article" published in a given scholarly journal has been cited in a particular year or period, developed by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) for use in Journal Citation Reports. It is a multidisciplinary tool for ranking, evaluating, and comparing journals within subject categories. Journals of higher Impact Factors are considered more important than those with lower IF. 

Journal Impact Factor is a journal level metric. It cannot reflect the quality of individual articles in a journal. But it is still one of the most important indicator for librarians in collection management, journal publishers in marketing, information analysts in bibliometric research, and authors to identify journals in which to publish.

XJTLU Library has subscribed to Journal Citation Reports (JCR), one of the leading tool to evaluate and compare journals by using citation data. 

There are two editions in JCR:

• JCR Science Edition -- containing data about more than 9,000 journals in science and technology
• JCR Social Sciences Edition -- containing data about more than 3,000 journals in the social sciences

You can use JCR to find the citation information (including Impact Factor) for all journals in a specific subject category, or search for the data for individual journals indexed in Web of Science.  

To start searching JCR, please go to the Library's Database A-Z list (http://libguides.lib.xjtlu.edu.cn/az.php) and find JCR under 'J'.

Here is a few PPT slides about how to use JCR to measure journal impact:

The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators. As you may know, JCR is developed from the information contained in Web of Science. Similarly, SCImago Journal & Country Rank is developed based on the information in another famous citation database -- Scopus. 

In SCImago, you can find out journal rankings, search for a specific journal and its citation data, search for country citation data and trend, compare similar journals, etc., and the data is visualised.