Blume Library: Journal Impact Factors: Overview

Standard journal impact factors

Researchers seeking to find appropriate publication venues and librarians seeking to develop strong and influential collections often rely on resources that provide measures of journal or individual article use in the research of others. Below is a short list of such measures.

Eigenfactor
As noted in the Eigenfactor.org website, this ranking and mapping system is an academic research project sponsored by the Bergstrom Lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. The citation data used at Eigenfactor comes from Thomson Scientific's Journal Citation Reports (JCR). This database is freely available.
Google Scholar Metrics
Google Scholar Metrics provide an easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications. This database is freely available.
SCImago Journal & Country Rank
"The SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.)". The SJR rankings are freely available.
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Journal Rankings in SJR make use of the H index which can measure the impact of journals, individual articles, researchers, and even the output of research by country.
Scopus CiteScore
CiteScore is a free service provided by Elsevier's Scopus indexing service. Unlike Journal Citation Reports, front matter material is also counted in the metric which may dilute the CiteScore metric of journals with extensive front matter material.

Altmetrics

Citation counts have been the traditional means of assessing the impact of journals, individual articles, and the work of individual scholars. Changes in the technology of scholarly communication have provided additional measures to assess how information is acquired and used. There are several resources available that utilize these alternative metrics (altmetrics). Below is a short list of guides already created by other institutions which provide information about altmetrics.

Ball State University Libraries
Northwestern University Library
PlumX Metrics
Also known as Plum Analytics. You will see Plum Analytics altmetrics in some of our database records.
University of Cincinnati Health Sciences Library
In addition to a list of altmetrics, the Health Sciences Library has provided some definitions and some additional tools to monitor the use of altmetrics.

Articles, Projects, and Blogs

Using various metrics to measure scholarship is not without controversy. Below are links to blogs, wikis, and articles that discuss assessment of scholarly research.

2020 Altmetric Top 100 Articles
London-based Altmetric Company list of the most talked about research articles based on alternative metrics.
Citation Performance Indicators--A Very Short Introduction Blog entry by Phil Davis from The Scholarly Kitchen Blog--published May 15, 2017
Keeping Up With...Altmetrics
Part of an online current awareness series, published by the Association of College & Research Libraries, a division of the American of the American Library Association
Center for Open Science TOPS Guidelines
"TOP Factor assesses journal policies for the degree to which they promote core scholarly norms of transparency and reproducibility."