Blog Archives
Citation data and metrics in Google Scholar
Google Scholar has offered basic metrics data for some time, but the service has seen some interesting developments recently that make it easy to discover highly-cited journals and articles for a wide selection of academic disciplines.
Journal Citation Reports: 2012 data now available
Thomson Reuters have just released the 2012 Edition of Journal Citation Reports (JCR).
Eagerly awaited by editors and publishers alike, JCR is the authoritative source of journal impact factors for nearly 11,000 peer reviewed journals.
In this edition some 379 journals have received their first impact factor and 66 have had theirs suppressed due to ‘anomolous citation patterns’ (JCR Notices).
Mendeley bought by Elsevier
Are you a Mendeley user?
If so, you may be interested to see what happens now that Mendeley has been bought out by Elsevier.
At £65m the benefits to the creators of Mendeley are clear to see, but how will its user community fare under the new ownership? There seem to be some concerns among academics that Mendeley will lose some of its independence and openness – you can follow the discussion here.
Update 16/4/2013: Further discussion from Research Information here.
Thanks to Ray Kent from De Montfort University for sharing this news on the JISCmail MORE list.
Increasing your citation count – a how-to guide
FAQ: How can I ensure my work is highly cited?
As a researcher there are a number of ways you can give your citation counts a boost, here are some suggestions.
Content is key
- Produce a piece of well written, top quality, original research. This is essential.
Assessing journal quality – alternatives to JCR
Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is the definitive source for journal impact factors, probably the most widely recognised quality indicators for journals. But what do you do if your subject area is not well covered by JCR or you would like to see some alternative metrics?
There are a number of tools available. These use a combination of citation analysis, peer review and ranking algorithms to facilitate the evaluation of journals in a range of subject areas.
New bibliometrics workshop: What can it do for you?
Would you like to know how to use bibliometrics to evaluate the performance of other researchers and to increase the impact of your own work? Dr Miggie Pickton and Nick Dimmock from Research Support will be running a 2 hour workshop, on Tuesday 22nd January 5-7pm at Avenue campus, on bibliometrics and how to apply it.
Bibliometrics (or the statistical analysis of published literature) has come to the fore recently as a method for assessing research performance. Citation analysis in particular is now used to rank articles, journals, authors and even universities.
New resource: Journal Citation Reports
Good news! The University now has a subscription to the sector’s leading tool for assessing the impact and prestige of scholarly journals: Journal Citation Reports (otherwise known as JCR).
Based on citation data from journals indexed by Thomson Reuters, JCR calculates and reports the impact factors that are boasted of and aspired to by publishers and editors of academic journals. For researchers, they can provide a rough and ready measure of journal quality and answer the oft-asked question of “where should I publish if I want my work to have the highest impact?”.
Why citation counts can’t always be trusted
I have written before about the limitations of citation analysis in identifying the ‘best’ research papers but I’ve never before seen anybody attempting to buy citations with marzipan.
According to Kent Anderson, CEO/Publisher of the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery, this apparently was how one eager Editor sought to increase his journal’s impact factor.
Read the full shocking story here.
Thanks to Jenny Delasalle of Warwick University for tweeting the above link.
Image credit: Musical Linguist on Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Journal impact factors
FAQ: What is a journal impact factor and why does it matter?
A journal’s impact factor is used to evaluate the relative importance of a journal in its field. The higher the impact factor, the more prestigious the journal. From a researcher’s point of view, ‘high impact’ journals are usually perceived to be the ‘best’ and most career enhancing places to be published.
The impact factor is a statistical measure; a journal with a high impact factor will have received more citations than one with a low impact factor.
Citation analysis tool – Publish or Perish
This is one of a series of posts describing tools that are available for citation analysis. For other tools see here.
Harzing’s Publish or Perish (PoP) “is a software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations, then analyzes these and calculates a series of citation metrics.” (Publish or Perish User’s Manual, 2012)
UON Graduate School Blog 
