Citation counts and journal quality
As teachers and researchers in a university environment it is important for you to track your own citations and to publish in quality journals. How do you achieve this? There is no easy answer. Here is some help in assessing the top journals and in finding out how many people are citing your work.
Citation tracking
Traditionally this has been easier to check in the Sciences and less successful in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. eSKILLS Plus has a module on citation tracking. It gives examples of how to use Web of Science, Google Scholar and other sources of citations.
You can work through searching Thomson ISI’s Web of Science, which includes Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. There is a Cited Reference Search tailor-made to discover who has cited an article since its publication. There are limitations to using Web of Science and these are outlined in the citation tracking tutorial.
Google Scholar also offers a citation count for publications, including articles, books, research reports and so on. There are also limitations to Google Scholar, but it is still a useful tool.
Other UNE subscription databases offer citation tracking within disciplines. In general they inform you about references already within the index that have cited a particular article.
The databases with citation tracking features include CSA (eg Biological Sciences, EconLit, ERIC, Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts, PsycInfo and Sociological Abstracts), HighWire, JSTOR, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, SciFinder Scholar and Wiley InterScience.
Journal quality
There are a number of tools that will help you rank journals and publishers.
- eSKILLS Plus has a tutorial on Journal Quality that defines impact factors and shows you how to use Thomson ISI’s Journal Citation Reports to obtain rankings for individual journals or discipline areas. If you want to check if a particular journal title is listed in the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index or Social Sciences Citation Index, use ISI’s Journal lists for searchable databases.
- The ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia) journal rankings for the PCE (Physical, Chemical and Earth Sciences) are in Excel format. Scopus is supplying citation count benchmarks for these titles. The HCA (Humanities and Creative Arts) lists have not yet been finalised. In the meantime see John Lamp's draft journal rankings by Field of Research.
- Ted Bergstrom is an American academic promoting open access to academic research and argues strongly against expensive journal pricing by publishers.
He and his colleagues have developed Eigenfactor, a free online tool that ranks journals across the disciplines by citation influence and journal pricing. The list of journal titles analysed matches those in Thomson ISI’s Journal Citation Reports. There are also FAQs on how the scores are worked out. You can search by subject and the rankings are currently searchable from 1995 to 2006. - Red Jasper is another company that has developed a journal ranking website. You have to register to use it fully but it is free. The title list also matches those in Thomson ISI’s Journal Citation Reports, although their method of ranking is different to JCR.
- Ulrich’s Periodical Directory provides detailed information about journals covering all subject areas, international and Australian. You can find out Table of Contents, the formats available (print, online, microfiche), publisher & ordering information, editors, and which databases (such as Australian Public Affairs, Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index etc.) index each journal. Ulrich’s doesn’t rank journals by impact factors, but you can check if they are peer-reviewed. Try this example for criminology. Go to ulrichsweb, click on the Advanced search button in the middle of the red toolbar at the top.
- Use the INDEX button on the left if you want to find out Ulrich's subject headings.
- Ticking the Refereed limits your search to those journals which are definitely peer-reviewed.
- You can also restrict the Country of Publication to Australia, United Kingdom or United States and the language to English if you wish.
The results list will be large. There is a choice at the bottom of the list to see the results up to 125 per page instead of 25. - If you want to restrict your results even further, click on the 'Revise search' button at the top left of your results. 'New search' will clear your search options altogether.
- Choose other limits, such as adding another subject heading.
- eSKILLS Plus offers an excellent tutorial on Writing for Publication.
e-publications@UNE
e-publicationsatUNE is the University of New England's repository of research papers, book chapters and theses written by UNE staff and students. It is being used to store DEST reportable publications and is also open access. If copyright prevents material from being made completely available online a citation and abstract are provided. Google picks up on university repositories and so your work will receive world-wide exposure.
There are comprehensive FAQs on copyright issues, publisher rights, and submission of materials (through the Research Management Information System). e-publications@UNE can be searched by Title, Author, Contributor/Supervisor, Subject, RFCD code, School, Journal, Publisher and Form of material (theses, for example).