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Publishing Research

Journal Impact

Eigenfactor

The Eigenfactor came out of the Metrics Eigenfactor Project conducted at the University of Washington and can be accessed freely at eigenfactor.org or through Journal Citation Reports (JCR).

A journal's Eigenfactor is a measure of the journal's overall importance to the research community. It considers not just direct citations to a journal's articles but rather the entire network of citations that are linked to that journal's articles.

Like the Impact Factor, the Eigenfactor Score is essentially a ratio of number of citations to total number of articles, but takes into account the source of those citations. Unlike the Impact Factor, the Eigenfactor Score:

  • Counts citations to journals in both the sciences and social sciences.
  • Eliminates self-citations. Every reference from one article in a journal to another article from the same journal is discounted.
  • Weights each reference according to a stochastic measure of the amount of time researchers spend reading the journal

The Eigenfactor uses Thomson Reuters (ISI Web of Science) citation data.


Article Influence

A journal's Article Influence is a measure of the average influence of its articles over the first five years after publication. The AI measures the relative importance of the journal on a per-article basis.  It is the journal's Eigenfactor Score divided by the number of articles published by the journal. The mean Article Influence Score is 1.00. 

The Article Influence uses Thomson Reuters (ISI Web of Science) citation data.

The Article Influence score can be accessed freely at eigenfactor.org or through Journal Citation Reports (JCR).

Citation Impact

Citation indexes track references that authors put in the bibliographies of published papers. They provide a way to search for and analyze the literature in a way not possible through simple keyword/topical searching. It also enables users to gather data on the "impact" of journals, as well as assessing particular areas of research activity and publication. This field is called bibliometrics.

What Can I Do with Citation Indexes?

  • Find papers that cite earlier papers.

  • Find out how many times my papers have been cited.

  • Determine my h-index.

  • Find journal impact factors.

Citation-Enabled Databases

Web of Science

Use Cited by in the results list or the Cited Reference Search tab.

The Web of Science is the original citation research database and indexes citation information from the articles in over 12,000 journals worldwide, including open access journals and over 150,000 conference proceedings from the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities.

View the tutorial for Cited Reference Searching in Web of Science

View the tutorial for Author Searching

CINAHL

Use Cited References in the results list or select the Cited References search option listed under "More."

CINAHL is the premier research database for nursing and allied health literature.

PsycINFO

Selected Cited References from the top menu and search by author or other elements from a specific citation.

PsycINFO provides indexing coverage of all document types, including journal articles, book chapters, books, dissertations, and technical reports. The database is international in scope.

Google Scholar

Use Cited By in the search results. Google Scholar includes citations from an array of sources in its cited by calculation, including PowerPoints and Word documents. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.