Journal Citation Reports
Worksheet
Time required: around 20 minutes
This worksheet provides detailed worked examples and goes through the main functions of JCR both for
individual journal title search and to obtain subject category journal ranking lists.
For a comparison with other journal ranking tools our Journal Ranking Tools worksheet can be used which
covers 5 alternative products.
Please explore the other MyRI items that can be used with this practical worksheet –
online tutorial, posters, datasheets, product profiles and booklet
Website: http://www.ndlr.ie/myri/
Last edited: 02 May 2011
For your notes
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ISI Journal Citation Reports
This is the most widely used journal ranking product and metric. All citations are given the same weight,
regardless of the number of authors, the nature of the citing publication, the age of the citing article etc.
1. Search for an individual journal title
You can use JCR to look up an individual known title of interest and check its impact and other
metrics

Access Journal Citation Reports using the route provided by your institution

Select Social Science or Science titles – JCR Social Sciences edition in
this example (keep the year as the most recent year)

Select “search for a Specific journal” in the right column

Click on the submit button below

A new input screen is displayed with a good range of input examples given

Note in box 1 you have a number of choices for searching for a title

Leave at the default Full Journal Title for now
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
Type in Harvard Law Review in box 2 and
click on the Search button

You will see the results and metrics for the journal title
2. Check the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) of the title
Impact Factor covers a 2 year window, i.e. it calculates citations this year to material published
in the 2 previous years, and it is the “gold standard” of journal ranking. But a 5-Year Impact
Factor has been introduced, useful for research areas where materials that are much older get
cited a lot. In this example you can see that the 5-Year Impact Factor is a little bit lower. You
can only evaluate these JIFs by comparing them with those of other journals in the same specific
research area.
3. Check the other metrics provided: Immediacy Index and Cited Half-life
Immediacy Index measures how quickly published research in an area is cited by others.
Cited Half-life indicates how many years back you go to reach the point where half the citations
are included. The higher the figure is the longer the time period during which research is
actively cited in a discipline. Unfortunately, the scale only goes up to 10 and after that, as in this
example, you just always see >10 which means over half the current citations to this title refer
to work more than 10 years old.
Note that the product also shows the Eigenfactor ranking of the title, a very different style of
calculation to the Journal Impact Factor, and one which ranks citations by things such as the
impact of the citing article
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4. Click on the journal title to reveal some more useful metrics
Here is some of the additional information you can view:
 Click on the Journal Title – highlighted in blue
You see a new display with considerable detail as you scroll down, this is the first part of
the screen:
1. Which journals cited material in this journal?
Click on the Cited Journal Data button
to see a ranked list of which journals cite articles in this title the most – and this shows
you in the left column the JIF of these journals in turn, so you can see if the citing
articles are from high impact titles in the field, or not
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Click on the Return to Journal button now
2. How much self-citing do authors do, and what is the re-calculated JIF for Harvard Law
Review if these are discounted?
Click on the Journal Self Cites option to see what percentage of self cites there
are, and the JIF of the title if these are left out of the calculation. In this example some
4% of citations are self-cites
Scroll back up to the top of the page now
3. What is the trend of the impact factor over a period of years?
Click on the Impact Factor Trend button to see this
In this particular example the Impact Factor is declining year on year since 2006
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Click on the Return to Journal button now
4. Where does this journal rank in the various subject rank listings? As mentioned already,
the JIF of a title on its own means little, it is its relative place in the field that is the
important issue
Click on the Journal Ranking button in the Journal Information section of the
screen.
In this example we see at a glance that based on Impact Factor this title is ranked
number 2 in the Law journal category
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If the title features in several subject listings they will all be shown. Here is an example
of that for the Economic History Review, which is in 2 subject lists:
5. Choose a subject and see the top impact journal ranking table
The other main use of JCR apart from checking an individual journal is to start by picking a
subject category and get the top ranked journals in that field by impact.

Return to the home page by clicking on the Welcome button
 Choose JCR Science edition and on the right choose View a group of
journals by Subject Category (the default)

Then click on the Submit button
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
A new input screen appears:

In box 1, the Subject Category drop down values box
Pick the subject category Nanoscience & Nanotechnology (note that
you can pick more than one by holding down the Control CTRL key on your
keyboard and selecting a second one)

In the second box you have various options but now Choose View Journal data
(the default) and from the drop –down menu select Impact Factor as
the sort order
Click on Submit

You will now see a list of the top ranked journals in this field based on Impact
Factor
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6. Explore sorting the ranked table by different metrics
The 2 year Journal Impact Factor is usually used to rank journals in a field but you can try sorting
by 5-Year Impact Factor or Total Cites, and see the extent to which this alters the table.

Alter the sort order to 5-Year Impact Factor and click on Sort
Again button to see the ranked list based on this new criterion
You will see with this particular title that the top 4 rankings do not alter
whether looking at cites to material from the last 2 or the last 5 years. But after
that this does alter the ranking tables in positions 5 and below, there are
differences when looking at citations to a longer range of years
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