CHE 4971: Proseminar (Oerther)

Libguide for CHE 4971 - Proseminar with Prof. Oerther

Impact Factors

For your assignment, you need to find an article published in the last year from a journal with an impact factor over 4.0.

What does this mean?

Impact Factors are a measure of the frequency with which an average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. For example, if a journal has an Impact Factor of 4 in 2015, then its papers published in 2014 and 2013 received 4 citations each on average in 2015.  Journal Impact Factors from 2015 are released in June of 2016. To have an Impact Factor, a Chemistry journal must be indexed in the Web of Science database as part of the Science Citation Index.

How is journal Impact Factor calculated?

  • A  = # of cites in 2015 within Web of Science to articles published in this journal in 2014 and 2013.  
  • B  = # of articles published in 2014 and 2013 in this journal. Only original research articles and review articles are included. Letters to the editor, notes, commentary are excluded.
  • C = A/B = 2015 Impact Factor

Finding Impact Factors using Journal Citation Reports (InCites JCR)

Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is a comprehensive resource that allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from over 11,000 scholarly and technical journals from more than 3,300 publishers in over 80 countries. Citation and article counts are important indicators of how frequently current researchers are using individual journals. By tabulating and aggregating citation and article counts, JCR offers a unique perspective for journal evaluation and comparison.

When using JCR to look up the impact factor of a journal, there are two methods you can follow:

  1. View all journals in a subject area and then search within those journals whose impact factors are over 4, or
  2. Search for articles on your topic first and then look up their journals by title.

To view all Chemistry journals, click on "Select Categories" on the left side of the page then select any or all of the Chemistry options. Don't forget to click "submit" at the bottom of the column!

To search for a specific Chemistry journal, click on "Select Journal" and enter the name of the journal in the "Search Journals" box.

Be sure when you are using JCR that you are selecting "JCR Science Edition" and the most current year.