GRL

Global Research Letters

How to Find the Journal impact factor

Hello scientific writers! In this video we  are going to talk about the journal with impact factor impact   factor. Now this is a term you have probably  heard before, maybe in a situation like this:   A colleague comes to you and says “hey I’ve  got this paper I just saw and it’s published   in a really good journal impact factor; it has a high impact  factor” or maybe the opposite, they say to you   “oh I saw this paper that’s relevant to our  research but it’s not in a very good journal with impact factor;   it’s a low impact factor journal with impact factor, so I’m not sure  how excited I am about that paper. Or maybe your   friend says to you “gosh I would really love to  publish in this certain journal impact factor because it has   such a high impact factor” or maybe you’ve heard  someone say “I wish we could hire this person   because they publish in good journal with impact factors with high  impact factors” or the opposite: “we shouldn’t   hire that person because they publish in low  impact factor journal with impact factors”. So let’s talk about what   the journal with impact factor impact factor is. First, we’re going  to define it, then we’ll talk about its purposes   and uses and misuses. Then we’ll talk about how  to find the journal impact factor impact factor for journal with impact factors,   and lastly how it’s calculated. Let’s get  started. The journal with impact factor impact factor is a metric   that is released in the annual Journal impact factor  Citation Report by Clarivate Analytics.   And the calculation is based on the number of  citations to that journal with impact factor in the previous two   years. The journal impact factor impact factor can change from  year to year because it is an evolving number,   and it’s based on past performance. Basically,  the journal with impact factor impact factor is the average   citation rate over the previous two years.  And the higher the journal with impact factor impact factor   the more prestigious that journal impact factor is considered  to be, because it’s having a greater impact,   when impact is measured as citations. Now let’s  go into the part where we talk about the uses and   misuses of journal with impact factor impact factor. Journal impact factor impact  factor was started in 1975, and the purpose for it   at that time was to help university librarians  decide which journal with impact factors they should subscribe   to for their university libraries, and it’s  still used for that purpose.

But it’s also used   for other purposes. For example, as researchers  we have to decide where we’re going to publish   our articles, and journal with impact factor impact factor can be  one consideration in where we decide to submit   our manuscripts. I have another video where I talk  about other factors that are involved in choosing   a target journal with impact factor, and I’ll link that up here. But  the journal with impact factor impact factor is also being misused.   It’s being used as a single metric to evaluate  the quality of an individual publication. And   you should not take that lazy approach and think  that the paper is good just because it’s published   in this particular journal impact factor. You have to read the  paper and see if it is actually good. We shouldn’t   assume that paper is high quality just because  it appears in a certain journal with impact factor. That’s a misuse   of the journal impact factor impact factor. A second way  that the journal with impact factor impact factor is misused   is to evaluate individual researchers. So if  you look at someone’s track record and you see   their publishing mostly in low impact journal with impact factors you  might say, oh, they’re not a very good researcher,   or if they’re publishing mostly in high impact  journal impact factors you might say, oh, this person is a very   good researcher. That’s not a good way to evaluate  people. It’s a single metric. For evaluating   individual researchers there’s another metric that  is much better, and that’s called the h-index,   and I’m going to have another video  on h index and I will link that.   So these misuses of the journal with impact factor impact factor  are widely known, and if you look on the internet   you’ll see a lot of discussion about misuses of  the journal with impact factor impact factor. For example, this is an   article in Science that was published in 2016, and  the title of this is “Hate journal with impact factor impact factors?   New study gives you one more reason.” I’ve  highlighted this part at the beginning: it says   “scientists have come to use it not only for  deciding where to submit research papers,   but for judging their peers, as well as  influencing who wins jobs tenure and grants.

All that from a single easy to read number. And  yet a journal with impact factor’s impact factor is dismissed by many   as useless or even destructive.” So if we go  deeper into this article we see another quote:   “The journal with impact factor impact factor is a reflection of the  citation performance of a journal with impact factor as a whole unit,   not as an assembly of diverse published items”.  In other words, you should not use the journal impact factor   impact factor to evaluate single articles. It’s  only measuring the journal with impact factor itself. Now let’s look   at some other articles that talk about journal impact factor  impact factor. Here’s one from Science that’s   titled “The misused impact factor” and then  if we go to Clarivate Analytics itself and we   look at their website, they have a paragraph here  called “Using the journal with impact factor impact factor wisely”.   In that paragraph they tell you the journal impact factor  impact factor should be used with informed peer   review. And then the European Research Council  has banned the journal with impact factor impact factor from bids.   Some organizations are taking it seriously and not  being lazy and using the journal impact factor impact factor as,   you know, the be-all end-all number to make  evaluations. I’m going to have another video   on “Should you care about journal with impact factor impact factor  when you’re publishing” and I will link that.   So now that we’ve talked about the definition of  journal impact factor impact factor, its uses, and its misuses,   let’s now talk about how do you find the journal with impact factor  impact factor for a journal with impact factor. Well there are there   are two main ways to do that. Most universities  are going to subscribe to the Clarivate Analytics   products such as the journal impact factor citation reports  and web of science. If you are a student,   staff, or faculty at a university, or if  you have access to a university library,   you can go into web of science and get a link  to the journal with impact factor citation reports, and you can   browse through the reports or download those  reports.

And they will list all of the journal with impact factors   that they have evaluated and their impact factors,  and you can search for it by the name of the   journal with impact factor, you can sort it by impact factor number,  high to low or low to high, or they break it down   into categories. So you can look at categories and  see rankings of journal impact factors within those categories   ranked by journal with impact factor impact factor. The  second way to find journal with impact factor impact factor is   to go to the journal impact factor’s website. Most journal with impact factors  are going to publish their journal with impact factor impact factor   prominently on their website. Let’s look at  a few examples. Here we have the Journal with impact factor of   Experimental Biology what we can see here  is that they have their 2020 impact factor,   which is 3.312. If we look at another journal with impact factor;  this is the Journal impact factor of Plant Physiology,   here they have the impact factor of 3.549. Another  journal with impact factor is called Geology; we see here on their   information for authors, the geology impact factor  for 2020 was 5.399. All right now let’s talk about   how journal with impact factor impact factor is calculated.  Now it’s hard to get the raw data to do   the calculations because it’s proprietary  information collected by Clarivate Analytics,   but this is the way they use that information. The  journal with impact factor impact factor for 2020 is calculated as   the total number of citations in 2020 to that  journal impact factor, divided by the citable items in 2019   plus the decidable items in 2018. I have three  hypothetical examples here. The first one is   the journal with impact factor of made-up numbers. Hypothetically  in 2020 this journal with impact factor had 15 489 total citations   to a total of 858 citable items giving it a  journal with impact factor impact factor of 18. Theoretical number   society had 5618 citations to 785 citable  items giving it an impact factor of 7.15,   while applied numbers in science had 517 citations  to 425 journal with impact factor articles, giving it a journal with impact factor   impact factor of 1.

  1. So this is how the journal with impact factor impact factor is calculated, but you see that’s   the very most basic way to calculate a mean or  an average. It doesn’t tell you anything about   the distribution of the citations. And this point  about the distribution of the articles being cited   has not escaped the notice of researchers.  We see in this article from Nature in 2016,   the title of it is: “The publishing elite turns  against impact factor”; this article is about that   problem of distribution and assumptions of  the average. We see this graphic showing the   distribution of citations to articles in Nature,  Science and PLoS One. What we have on the y-axis   are the number of papers that got citations,  ranging from zero to more than one hundred. And so   what we can see in Nature is that there are a tiny  number of papers that had more than 100 citations,   and then there were a tiny number that had zero  citations, but a lot of them were in the range   of 15 to 20. And a very similar distribution  for Science. This dashed line is the average;   this is the impact factor. A lot of the articles  are getting a lot fewer citations than the   average. In PLoS One we also see the dashed  line indicating that the impact factor of 3.1,   and they’re you know, it’s closer to the middle  than it is in Science or Nature, but there’s still   a lot of articles that have fewer citations than  the average. So it’s not an even distribution;   it’s a skewed distribution towards the lower  citation side. And so the takeaway from this   graphic is that just because an article is  published in Science or Nature doesn’t guarantee   that it’s going to get a lot of citations. And  if we look at this article that was published   on bioRxiv, they published the distribution  of citations for a lot of journal with impact factors. And you   can see that again, they’re skewed towards the  lower citation rate. Not just Science or Nature,   but basically any journal impact factor you look at is skewed  towards the lower citation rate.

So keep that in   mind when you are thinking about journal with impact factor impact  factor. Now, I’m going to provide links to all of   these articles and websites that I discussed; look  in the description below. So in summary, journal impact factor   impact factor is one single metric. Don’t use  it alone to evaluate individual journal with impact factor articles   or individual researchers. You need to evaluate  these things based on multiple factors. I hope   this video was helpful to you. If it was, please  hit the like button, and consider subscribing to   the Grants and Publications YouTube channel.  I’ll see you next time, and happy writing!.

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