Journal Citation Reports
Annual publication covering academic journals
- 3 min read
- 5 chapters
Related on Lably
Through Social science
Basic journal information
The information given for each journal includes:
- the basic bibliographic information of publisher, title abbreviation, language, ISSN
- the subject categories (there are 254 subject categories in the 2022 edition)
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Citation information
- Basic citation data:
- the number of articles published during that year and
- the number of times the articles in the journal were cited during the year by later articles in itself and other journals,
- detailed tables showing
- the number of times the articles in the journal were cited during the year by later articles in itself and other journals,
- the number of citations made from articles published in the journal that year to it and other specific individual journals during each of the most recent ten years (the 20 journals most cited are included)
- the number of times articles published in the journal during each of the most recent 10 years were cited by individual specific journals during the year (the twenty journals with the greatest number of citations are given)
- and several measures derived from these data for a given journal: its impact factor, immediacy index, etc.
There are separate editions for the sciences and the social sciences; the 2013 science edition includes 8,411 journals, and the 2012 social science edition contains 3,016 titles. The issue for each year is published the following year after the citations for the year have been published and the information processed. The publication is available online (JCR on the Web), or in CD format (JCR on CD-ROM); it was originally published in print, with the detailed tables on microfiche. In general, various universities, administrative centers and ministries in charge of higher education make their evaluations of university professors and other researchers on the number and quality of articles published in journals indexed in the JCR.
Release schedule
In recent years, it has often been released in mid-June. The 2017 Journal Citation Reports, based on 2016 data, was released on 14 June 2017.
Integrations
In April 2020, Journal Citation Reports included a beta for open access data, which uses Unpaywall data. It officially left the beta phase with the release of the 2020 JCR in June 2020.
Impact factor
The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a type of journal ranking. Journals with higher impact-factor values are considered more prestigious or important within their field. Impact factor is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate's Web of Science. The impact factor of a journal reflects the yearly mean number of article citations published in the last two years. While frequently used by universities and funding bodies to decide on promotion and research proposals, it has been criticised for distorting good scientific practices.