JOURNAL CITATION REPORTS ® – “THE JCR” FEBRUARY 2009 ENHANCEMENTS GSS – Thomson Reuters, Scientific Business, A&G January 2009

For decades, the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) has served as a foundation of journal collection development, characterization, and evaluation within academic and government libraries worldwide. In early 2009 an unprecedented enhancement and release of the JCR is scheduled, incorporating new metrics and information to complement the high-profile Impact Factor. Journal Citation Reports ® – Forthcoming Enhancements

Why add additional metrics to the JCR? Our objective in including this new information is to expand one’s evaluative perspective on scholarly journals, to provide a more thorough and well-rounded overview of their overall impact and influence. Journal Citation Reports ® – Forthcoming Enhancements

New Metrics & Information Five-Year Impact Factor Rank-in-Category Tables Box Plots Illumination of Journal Self-Citations Eigenfactor Metrics TM : Eigenfactor TM and Article Influence TM Journal Citation Reports ® – Forthcoming Enhancements

Citation Behavior, variance among disciplines : Some fields are very fast moving, particularly within the life sciences, and published research gets cited at a relatively rapid pace. Research in other fields, mathematics for example, makes its impact more slowly over an extended period of time Impact Factor Years Journal Citation Reports ® – Forthcoming Enhancements

Immunology Journal Citation Reports ® – Forthcoming Enhancements Introduction of a 5-Year Impact Factor : To better gauge the impact of journals within fields where influence of published research evolves over a longer period of time than presented by the traditional 2-Year Impact Factor.  Impact Factor is based on two years of cited journal content – cites in the current year to journal material published in the prior two years.  A 5-Year Impact Factor is based on cites in the current year to journal material published in the prior five years.

Journal Citation Reports ® – Forthcoming Enhancements Geology Introduction of a 5-Year Impact Factor : To better gauge the impact of journals within fields where influence of published research evolves over a longer period of time than presented by the traditional 2-Year Impact Factor. Geology  Impact Factor is based on two years of cited journal content – cites in the current year to journal material published in the prior two years.  A 5-Year Impact Factor is based on cites in the current year to journal material published in the prior five years.

Journal Citation Reports ® – Forthcoming Enhancements Rank in Category table: Many journals maintain an editorial scope that necessitates their inclusion in more than one JCR category. To better reveal the influence of a journal in all assigned categories a Rank in Category table will display each category in which the journal appears along with rank in the category and the Quartile in which the journal is placed in that category - based on Impact Factor.

Journal Citation Reports ® – Forthcoming Enhancements Category Box Plot: A category Box Plot accompanies the Rank in Category table. The spacing between the different parts of the box, the quartiles, helps indicate the degree of dispersion of impact of journals within the category. View the journal's Impact Factor in the context of all Impact Factors for the journal's category as depicted by the graph – envisioning a line at the position of the journal’s Impact Factor helps one to better comprehend the display.

Journal Citation Reports ® – Forthcoming Enhancements  Journal Self-Citation itself is not an inherently “bad” practice.  Authors of course cite related research and this may have been published in the journal to which one in turn submits a paper for publication.  However -- 80% of all journals listed in the JCR Science Edition have self-citation rates of less than 20%. Based on trends within a category we can get an idea of what may be excessive self-citation, which weakens the integrity of the journal’s Impact Factor. Journal Self-Citation

Journal Citation Reports ® – Forthcoming Enhancements Illumination of Journal Self-citation Rates: To provide one the ability to easily compare self-citation rates among journals particularly as this influences Impact factor calculations. Category: Materials Science, Composites

Journal Citation Reports ® – Forthcoming Enhancements Eigenfactor Metrics TM : Eigenfactor TM and Article Influence TM : To compliment Impact Factor and other JCR metrics by providing a broader perspective on Journal Influence through specific measures now widely accepted by the scholarly community. These metrics are developed through The Eigenfactor Project™ -- a non- commercial academic research project sponsored by the Bergstrom lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. –

Journal Citation Reports ® – Forthcoming Enhancements Eigenfactor TM Score: Scholarly references join journals together in a vast network of citations. The Eigenfactor Score algorithm uses the structure of the entire network to evaluate the importance of each journal, cutting across all disciplines. Self-citations are excluded. This corresponds to a simple model of research in which readers follow chains of citations as they move from journal to journal. Eigenfactor calculations take into consideration a 5-year span of citation activity utilizing data from the Journal Citation Reports. Journals are considered to be influential if they are cited often by other influential journals.

Journal Citation Reports ® – Forthcoming Enhancements Article Influence TM Score: As with Eigenfactor Score, Article Influence Score: –Uses the structure of the entire citation network to evaluate the importance of each journal, based on JCR data. –Does not consider self-citations The calculation of Article Influence Score does in fact incorporate Eigenfactor Score. However, as Eigenfactor Score can be described as presenting the total collective value provided by all of the articles published in a journal in a year – Article Influence Score measures the average influence of individual articles appearing in the same journal, translating to the importance of an article published in that journal. Because it does present an average for article-level influence, Article Influence is more like the Impact Factor than Eigenfactor Score – though keep in mind the methodology is quite different and therefore provides a perspective different from but complimentary to Impact Factor.

JOURNAL CITATION REPORTS ® – “THE JCR” FEBRUARY 2009 ENHANCEMENTS GSS – Thomson Reuters, Scientific Business, A&G January 2009