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?
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.
Scopus has a citation tracker, author identifier, affiliation search and journal analyser that looks at journal performance. It covers the Sciences, Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities and is updated daily.
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 that have cited other articles within the same index.
The databases with citation tracking features include Biological Sciences, EconLit, ERIC, Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA), Physical Education Index, PILOTS Database, PsycInfo, Social Services Abstracts and Sociological Abstracts (all accessed through Proquest), HighWire, JSTOR, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, SciFinder Scholar and Wiley Online Library.
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 shows you how to use Thomson ISI’s Journal Citation Reports and Scopus to obtain rankings for individual journals. If you wish 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. SCImago and Scopus Journal Analyzer provide rankings for Scopus titles based on different scoring methods.
- The ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia) ranked journal list for PCE (Physical, Chemical and Earth Sciences) and HCA (Humanities and Creative Arts) are available in Excel format. For rankings by journal title or Field of Research, check John Lamp's pages. These also provide ERA rations for academic conferences.
- Ted Bergstrom and his colleagues have developed Eigenfactor, a free online tool that ranks journals across the disciplines by citation influence. 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 available for 1995 to 2006.
- Red Jasper has developed a journal ranking site. Free registration is required to make full use of the site. The title list also matches those in Thomson ISI’s Journal Citation Reports, although the ranking method is different.
- 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 to see if a particular journal is peer-reviewed.
Sometimes you will want to find information on a range of journals at once. Let's take journals on criminology as an example. Go to ulrichsweb, click on the Advanced search button in the middle of the red toolbar at the top.
- Enter criminology in the Subject box. 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.
e-publications@UNE
e-publications@UNE is the University of New England's repository of research (e.g. books, book chapters, journal articles, conference papers and theses) written by UNE staff and students. It contains material reportable under DIISR’s Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) and the Australian Research Council’s Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative and other items as time permits.
E-publications@UNE can be searched by Title, Author, Contributor/Supervisor, Subject, Field of Research code, Subject, School/Affiliation, Form of material (theses, for example), Journal/Conference name and Publisher or a combination of any of these.
The intent is to make UNE research material open access wherever possible. If copyright prevents full-text from being made available online, a citation, abstract and URL (when present) are provided. Your work will receive world-wide exposure as the repository will be OAI-PMH compliant in 2011, allowing Google and other harvesters to retrieve from it.
An FAQ, and advice on Open Access and Copyright are available.