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Engineering Grad Student Seminars

Guide for Graduate Students in the Whitacre College of Engineering

Journal Impact Factors

Journal impact measurements reflect the importance of a particular journal in a field and take into account the number of articles published per year and the number of citations to articles published in that journal.  Like author impact measurements, journal impact measures can be only so informative, and researchers in a discipline will have the best sense of the top journals in their field.

Click on the links to learn more.

Journal Citation Reports

Journal Citation Reports (or JCR) is a product of Clarivate Analytics and is an authoritative resource for impact factor data. This database provides impact factors and rankings of many journals in the social and life sciences based on millions of citations.  It offers numerous sorting options including impact factor, total cites, total articles, and immediacy index.  In addition, JCR provides a five-year impact factor and visualized trend data. 

Eignefactor

Eigenfactor

A journal's Eigenfactor score is measured as its importance to the scientific community.  Scores are scaled so that the sum of all journal scores is 100.  In 2006, Nature had the highest score of 1.992.  

  • Intended to reflect the influence and prestige of journals.  
  • Created to help capture the value of publication output vs. journal quality (i.e. the value of a single publication in a major journal vs. many publications in minor journals).

Article Influence Score

The mean Article Influence Score is 1.00.  An Article Influence Score greater than 1.00 indicates that the articles in a journal have an above-average influence.

  • Measures the average influence, per article, of the papers published in a journal.  
  • Calculated by dividing the Eigenfactor by the number of articles published in the journal.  

Advantages of Eigenfactor/Article Influence Score:

  • Can be accessed for free.
  • Includes a built-in evaluation period of five years.
  • Attempts to give a more accurate representation of the merit of citations than do raw citation counts.

Disadvantages of Eigenfactor/Article Influence Score:

  • Eigenfactor assigns journals to a single category, making it more difficult to compare across disciplines.
  • Some argue that Eigenfactor score isn't much different than raw citation counts (see a blog post on this topic by The Scholarly Kitchen, for example).

Below is an example of the Eigenfactor and Article Influence Scores for a few journals.  You can search the Eigenfactor Website to find the scores for journals of interest.

SciMago

The SCImago Journal and Country Rank portal is a free online resource that uses citation data from Scopus, a scholarly research database, to provide journal impact data. It also provides rankings by journal country of origin and numerous visual representations of journal impact data.  The ranking method is based on the well-known Google PageRank algorithm.