How to Find an Impact Factor

HOW TO FIND AN IMPACT FACTOR: This short video by John Bond of Riverwinds Consulting gives a quick quick explanation of the quickest ways to find a Journal's Impact Factor.

MORE VIDEOS on Finding a Journal's Impact Factor see my Playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqkE49N6nq3jAAssDubk…

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TRANSCRIPT:
Hi there. I am John Bond from Riverwinds Consulting and this is Publishing Defined.

Today I am going to discuss how to find the Impact Factor for a Journal.

A reminder, Impact Factor is a metric reflecting the average number of citations of recent articles published in that peer review journal.

Impact Factor is calculated from the Journal Citation Report or JCR published by Clarivate Analytics. Impact Factor was formerly owned by Thomson Reuters. It is derived from the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index. It covers about 11,000 journals from about 2,500 publishers.

The Impact Factor of a journal is the number of citations received in that year by articles published in that journal during the two preceding years, divided by the total number of articles published in that journal during the two preceding years. See my other YouTube video for more on calculating Impact Factor including an example.

There are two paths to finding an Impact factor. First, if you don’t have access to an academic library than the easiest way to find it is by Googling the name of journal and the words Impact factor. Many times, it will be listed on the search results page, but you will want to ensure it is the current one. Click through to the journal’s home page and when you are there, go the About section. I searched ten scholarly journals. Nine listed the Impact Factor on the search results page, but not always the most recent one. All ten however, listed the current Impact Factor on the About page. What is not listed on most About pages is a journal’s 5 Year Impact Factor or how it ranks compared to other journals in the field, both helpful metrics.

Now if you are looking for several journals, that can be a lot of searching and clicking around. The good news is if you have access to an academic library, it is much easier.

So, the second way to find Impact Factors is to log onto the academic library system you are connected with and look for either: databases or the Web of Science which contains some of the information in the Journal Citation Report.

If databases are listed, you can either search for Journal Citation Report and then just click on Science Citation Index and then search for the journal you are interested in and its Impact Factor.

Or if databases are not listed, check if the Web of Science is in your library’s offerings, then go to the search bar. Enter the name of the journal and change the drop down to Publication Name. Click on any random article, scroll to the bottom of that page and look for Journal Citation Report. Click there and your will see a host of information and data about the publication.

See this playlist of other videos about finding an Impact Factor including ones with screen shots.

Well that’s it. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel. And make comments below or email me with questions. Thank you very much and take care.