Increasing the impact of
journal articles
Heather Robb
Academic Liaison Librarian
Session outline
• Importance of getting your research read
• Individual citations
• Where to publish
– High ranking: journal citation reports
– Improving your citation count: Open Access and
repositories
• Optimising “citability”
Quick survey…
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WoK/WoS
JCR
SciVerse Scopus
PoP software
JULIET
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JIF
Eigenfactor
SCImagoJR
SNIP
h – index
Getting your research read
• Making research visible
• Why?
– Establishing research profile
– Research Evaluation Framework
• How?
– Reputable publishing routes
– New routes
– Networks
(2008) Taylor and Francis LibSite Newsletter, issue 9. p. 2
(2008) Taylor and Francis LibSite Newsletter, issue 9. p. 3
Things to consider
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Impact does not always = excellence
Citation cultures vary across disciplines
Publication cultures vary too
Research careers have different stages
Citations to individual papers
• Links between papers that have something in
common
• Tool to make connections
• Building on or challenging research
• Help make a judgement about impact an
article has made
• Sum of citations useful indication of impact of
an author
Web of Science
• 1955 E Garfield first published the idea of
measuring “impact” of journals using citations
• Science Citation Index (now part of Thomson
Reuters WoS) developed to highlight “formal,
explicit linkages between papers that have
particular points in common”
• Shift in use of this data to measure impact of
research - “a mortal sin” (Ton van Raan, 2010)
Science subjects
Social-science subjects
(2008) Taylor and Francis LibSite Newsletter, issue 9. p. 5
SciVerse Scopus
• Launched in 2004 by Elsevier
• Serious competition to Web of Science
• Main emphasis on science initially but broader
now
• Currently indexes 17000 journals plus
conference proceedings
• No access via Durham as we have WoK
Google Scholar
• Data for broader range of documents e.g.
books, reports
• Broader range of documents contribute to
higher number of citations
• More useful for recent documents
• Useful for subjects not covered by WoS
• More comprehensive in some areas
• Trace developments/versions of same paper
Publishers
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List of references
Can pull citation data from other providers
Some link to references and cited works
Alerts depend on citation in another journal
published by same publisher
Things you can do
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Count citations
Link to other related articles
Set up citation alerts
Search for cited references
See citation reports for journals and authors
Citation mapping
• Web of Science DEMO
Measuring & monitoring citations
• Counting citations – WoS, Scopus, JStor, SD,
publishers and GS
• Linked references – WoS, Scopus, JStor,
publishers
• Citation alerts –WoS, Scopus, publishers & GS
• Cited Reference Search – WoS, Scopus
• Citation Report – WoS, Scopus
• Map citations to find related material – WoS
Citation metrics
• h-index (Hirsch, 2005)
– An author’s number of articles (h) that have received at
least h citations
– a researcher with an h-index of 10 has published 10
articles that have each been cited at least 10 times
• g-index (Egghe, 2006)
– The highest number (g) of papers that together received g2
or more citations
– a researcher with a g-index of, say, 10 has published 10
papers that together have been cited at least 100 times
Activity
• Use Web of Science to try a citation search for
an article and look at the citation report
• Look for the same article in Google Scholar.
How do the number of citations vary using
Google Scholar?
Publish or Perish software
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Anne-Wil Harzing (2006) now up to ver 3.1
Aimed at individual researchers
Analyze their own performance
Uses a range of metrics
Free to download
PoP Book: your guide to effective and
responsible citation analysis. 2010
• http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm
Google Scholar Citations
• Aimed at individual researchers
• To keep track of citations to their papers
• Free to register your account and set up your
profile
Journal impact – JCR
• Uses citations to measure impact of a journal,
mainly for science and social science subjects
• Impact factor = average number of citations in
a year given to those papers in a journal that
were published during the two preceding years
• A journal that is cited once, on average, for
each article published has an JIF of 1.
Impact factor
Journal
X’s 2009
impact
factor
Citations in 2009 (in journals indexed
in Web of Knowledge) to all articles
published by Journal X in 2007 & 2008
=
Number of articles (deemed to be citable
by Web of Knowledge) that were
published in Journal X in 2007 & 2008
Web of Knowledge
Activity
• Look up a journal or subject area on Journal
Citation Reports via Web of Knowledge
Journal impact – Eigenfactor
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Uses WoS data
Get scores based on broader algorithms
Uses variety of document types
Visualisations – interactive browser useful for
publishing in another disciplines
Eigenfactor
Journal impact – SCImagoJR
• Uses data from SCOPUS
• Average number of weighted citations
received in given SJR year by documents
published in preceding three years.
• Ranking weights article cited in high ranking
journal rather than treating all citations the
same
• SNIP – source normalized impact per paper
ScimagoJR
Activity
• Use Eigenfactor or SCImago to look at
different types of ranking available for a
journal and compare with it’s impact factor in
Web of Knowledge
Open Access Publishing
• Open Access movement
– making publicly funded (and other) research freely
available
– Research Councils and other funders’ mandates,
see JULIET
• Journals
– Open Access Journal = free for all OR charge for
outgoing articles
– DOAJ, Journal Info
Open Access Publishing
• Repositories
– General listing: OpenDOAR
– Subject: arXiv
– Institutional: Durham Research Online (DRO)
– See RoMEO, find out if a publisher allows deposit
• Harvesters
– OAIster
– DRIVER
– Google Scholar – not just OA material
Activity
• Use JULIET to find your funder or one in your
subject area
• Look at subject or institutional repository or
harvester for relevant research articles
Optimizing your “citability”
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Construct a clear, descriptive title
Reiterate key phrases in the abstract
Improve ranking in databases and search engines
Human decision-making
Easier to find = more likely to be read = more
likely to be cited
• Downloads beginning to count as impact (eg
PLoS)
Wiley Blackwell guidelines
http://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/seo.asp
Australia's Forgotten Victims
Ever since the British colonists in Australia became aware of the
disappearance of the indigenous peoples in the 1830s, they have
contrived to excuse themselves by pointing to the effects of disease and
displacement. Many colonists called for the extermination of Aborigines
when they impeded settlement by offering resistance, yet there was no
widespread public acknowledgement of this as a policy until the later
1960s, when a critical school of historians began serious investigations of
frontier violence. Their efforts received official endorsement in the 1990s,
but profound cultural barriers prevent the development of a general
awareness of this. Conservative and right-wing figures continue to play
down the gravity of what transpired. These two aspects of Australian
public memory are central to the political humanisation of the country.
Genocide and Holocaust
Consciousness in Australia
Ever since the British colonists in Australia became aware of the
disappearance of the indigenous peoples in the 1830s, they have contrived
to excuse themselves by pointing to the effects of disease and
displacement. Yet although genocide was not a term used in the nineteenth
century, extermination was, and many colonists called for the extermination
of Aborigines when they impeded settlement by offering
resistance. Consciousness of genocide was suppressed during the twentieth
century until the later 1960s, when a critical school of historians began
serious investigations of frontier violence. Their efforts received official
endorsement in the 1990s, but profound cultural barriers prevent the
development of a general genocide consciousness. One of these
is Holocaust consciousness, which is used by conservative and right-wing
figures to play down the gravity of what transpired in Australia. These two
aspects of Australian public memory are central to the political
humanisation of the country.
Conclusions
• Different resources give different results for author
and publication impact
• Need to understand what is being measured
• Citations can be an indicator of article or author
impact
• Journal rankings give an idea of which journals are
cited most frequently
• Open Access increases reach of research
• Need to consider what will attract readers
References
Hirsch, J.E. (2005) An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research
output. PNAS. 102(46): 16569-16572 (original h-index paper)
Smeyers, P & Burbules, N.C. (2011) How to improve your impact factor:
questioning the quantification of academic quality. Journal of Philosophy
of Education. 45(1): 1-17
Van Noorden, R. (2010) A profusion of measures. Nature. 465: 864-866 (has a
handy “field guide to metrics”) . Part of a Nature special issue at
www.nature.com/metrics
www.journalmetrics.com (2010) The evolution of journal assessment.
(compares SCIMagoJR, AI, SNIP and JIF metrics in table at the end)
Evaluation
Please fill in the evaluation form – your
comments are greatly appreciated!
For more information contact Heather Robb
– heather.robb@dur.ac.uk
– 0191 3340276 or 0191 3341585