Journal Metrics

Journal Metrics


Journal metrics are used to identify key journals in a research
field.  This identification may be most useful to authors who are
considering which journals to submit manuscripts to for future
publication.


The Impact Factor may be the most familiar metric in academia. Eugene
Garfield of Thomson Scientific first introduced this idea in the 1950s.
Impact Factor calculations are now available through Thomson’s Journal
Citation Reports (JCR) and the Elsevier product, Scopus. However, each
database tends to be biased in favor of including journals that are
published by that particular publisher.


Despite their merits, journal metrics can be misused particularly in
the evaluation of individual authors. Newer measures of impact are
decribed on the altmetrics tab and provide an alternate way to evaluate scholarly impact.


Conducting Literature Reviews


Scholars will often publish journal articles that assess and
evaluate the top ranked journals in their field. Conduct a search in a
large interdisciplinary database such as Proquest Social Sciences Premium Collection or EBSCO's Academic Search Premier using
keywords such as "top journals" or "highly ranked journals" and the
field. For example, you could search in Academic Search Premier using
the terms "top ranked journals" and "economics". You can also select a
narrower subject specific database such as EconLit.  Alternatively search across a number of different databases for full-text articles using the Google Scholar search option.


Harvard Databases

Free Web Sites

Google Metrics

Altmetrics/ Other Metrics

Article & Author Level Metrics

Defining Altmetrics


The terms "altmetrics"
(alternative metrics) and "article level metrics" have been used to
describe approaches to measure the impact of scholarship by using new
social media tools such as bookmarks, links, blog postings, inclusion in
citation management tools and tweets to gauge the importance of
scholarly output.



Proponents
of altmetrics believe that using altmetrics will help measure the
impact of an article in a more comperhensive and objective way thaa was
done perviously with journal metrics databases like Journal Citation
Reports.  However, there are limits to this approach and caution should
be used to not rely on any one particular measure in evaluting the
importance of scholarship.



Altmetrics