Impact factor – Transcript

This is a transcript of the video "Impact factor", hosted on YouTube.

Transcript

[Caption] Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Australia.

[Caption] "Where can I find the impact factor for a journal I'd like to publish in?"

[Paula Callan, Scholarly Communications Librarian] The most commonly way research impact is measured is how many other researchers sight the journal article in which your research findings are published.

So, journals are ranked by how many citations their articles receive.

And if you think about a ranking as a very long list then journals that are in the top quartile are called Q1 journals.

So they're in the top quarter of the ranking.

Journals that are in the second quartile of the ranking are Q2 journals.

Now the H factor is related in so far as it's looking at citations.

And a journal that has an H factor of 60 means that it has 60 articles that have at least

60 citations in the particular year that you're looking at.

A journal that has an H factor of ten, only has ten articles that have at least ten citations each.

So you can see how that can be used to compare different journals.

But you do have to be careful when comparing journals on their H factor because it is effected by how many articles each journal publishes each year.

So you need to make sure you're comparing journals that publish roughly a similar number of articles each year.

[James] Okay, so that makes sense, would you be able to show me where we could find this information?

[Paula] Of course.

[Instructional screencast]

[Paula] Okay, so we are going to use the Scimago database and this database provides information about journals including their Q1 rating, Q2 rating, and their H factors.

So if we select journal ranks that gives the ranking of all the journals in the world so you can see there's 34,000 of them.

So we want to filter it to a particular subject area.

So for this example we'll select the subject area energy.

And then we can further refine the results by a sub category, and so I'm going to select renewable energy, sustainability and the environment.

So that will bring the list down to 395 journals, and this is from all around the world so you can see by the flags at the side, which country the journal was published in.

And so this a ranking of all the journals in this particular field.

Now if you think about the rank as a very long list, the journals that are in the top quarter are called Q1 journals.

So that's what the 'Q' stands for - it's in the top quartile.

And just next to it you will see it gives the H index, that's the H factor for that particular journal.

So, remember that 36 means that in this particular year, which was 2017, this journal had 36 articles that had at least 36 citations each.

If we scroll down the list you can see that when we get down to the journals in the second quartile, the colour changes to a orange colour or mustard colour and that means these are the second quartile.

And you can still see the H factors for each journal.

And the small open orange padlock means that this is an open access journal, so it's free for all readers in the world.

So if we want a little more information about a particular journal, we can click on the journal name and that provides information about the publisher and also there is a helpful link that says 'how to publish in this journal'.

So that provides really useful information for authors who are planning to submit to that journal.

And then if you want more information about the journal, you can scroll down the screen and see some of the information about the average citations per article.

And this gives you a bit more information about how high impact this journal is.

[End of video]