Impact Factor

[arthwollipot]

How can a member of the public like me find out the impact factor of various journals? Is there a site where I can enter the name of a journal and have it tell me what that journal's impact factor is? I haven't been able to find one. Should there be such a site? Are there legal concerns?

 

[Professor Yaffle]

How can a member of the public like me find out the impact factor of various journals? Is there a site where I can enter the name of a journal and have it tell me what that journal's impact factor is? I haven't been able to find one. Should there be such a site? Are there legal concerns?

http://scienceimpactfactors.blogspot.co.uk/ Only the top 40 for each discipline, but it may help.

ETA: A full list here in spreadsheet form: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/srtmun-chemistry-research/HsusUWuQCKw

 

[arthwollipot]

http://scienceimpactfactors.blogspot.co.uk/ Only the top 40 for each discipline, but it may help.

ETA: A full list here in spreadsheet form: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/srtmun-chemistry-research/HsusUWuQCKw

Hmm. It seems that I'm not familiar enough with the literature to be able to meaningfully interpret these results.

The journal I'm looking for is Case Reports in Transplantation. According to the spreadsheet, "Transplantation" has an IF of 4.003, which seems quite high. But is this referring to the same journal? The website itself lists a total of two articles that have cited articles in this journal. I can't imagine that two citations would generate an IF of 4.003.

 

[Professor Yaffle]

Transplantation seems to be a different journal:

http://journals.lww.com/transplantjournal/pages/default.aspx

Is Case Reports in Transplantation not listed?

ETA: I see its not. I also found this page, which lists impact factor where possible, and your journal of interest doesn't have one: http://www.medical-journals-links.com/transplantation-regenerative-medicine-journals.php

And:

For any journal to have an Impact Factor, it must have been tracked by Thomson Scientific (ISI) for three years.

http://www.springeropen.com/about/faq/impactfactor

The earliest articles on their site are from 2011, so it looks like it is too new to have an impact factor.

 

[Dinwar]

Out of curiosity, why are you looking for it? IF has always struck me as a fairly irrelevant statistic (a lot of vital journals get shafted thanks to it, merely because they're in a niche few researchers care about).

Seems like an IF of 4 for a medical journal is pretty easy. Most of the top ones on the good professor's link were to medical/medicine-related fields (only one ranked higher than Nature was in something else, for example). Makes sense, too--there are, to put it bluntly, a lot more doctors than there are researchers in other fields (meaning other individual fields, so like "There are more doctors than mathematicians", in case that's not clear).

 

[Sockor]

http://www.hindawi.com/crim/transplantation/citations/
"Articles published in Case Reports in Transplantation have been cited 2 times. The following is the list of the 2 articles that have cited one or more articles published in Case Reports in Transplantation."

 

[Professor Yaffle]

Out of curiosity, why are you looking for it? IF has always struck me as a fairly irrelevant statistic (a lot of vital journals get shafted thanks to it, merely because they're in a niche few researchers care about).

I assume its something to do with this thread, as that is the journal where the case study is published.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=259460

I have no idea why arthwollipot wants to know the impact factor though.

 

[catsmate]

Also there are several techniques to measure IF.

 

[ThunderChunky]

Out of curiosity, why are you looking for it? IF has always struck me as a fairly irrelevant statistic (a lot of vital journals get shafted thanks to it, merely because they're in a niche few researchers care about).

Seems like an IF of 4 for a medical journal is pretty easy. Most of the top ones on the good professor's link were to medical/medicine-related fields (only one ranked higher than Nature was in something else, for example). Makes sense, too--there are, to put it bluntly, a lot more doctors than there are researchers in other fields (meaning other individual fields, so like "There are more doctors than mathematicians", in case that's not clear).

IF is very field dependent and some journals like to boost their IF with review articles and self citations. But theoretically what would be a better metric to measure the impact of a journal?

 

[Dinwar]

IF is very field dependent and some journals like to boost their IF with review articles and self citations. But theoretically what would be a better metric to measure the impact of a journal?

Depends on why you're doing it. I tend to avoid the whole issue--it's an irrelevant complication that adds nothing to my understanding of anything, even the quality of the journals. High-quality research often exists in extremely low-impact journals, particularly in my field (species descriptions are NEVER high-impact, but serve as one of the foundational concepts in paleontology).

 

[arthwollipot]

Out of curiosity, why are you looking for it? IF has always struck me as a fairly irrelevant statistic (a lot of vital journals get shafted thanks to it, merely because they're in a niche few researchers care about).

Mostly curiosity, really. Yes, it's to do with the other thread, but not as a part of any argument therein. Impact Factor is a decent - though as you note not perfect - approximation of how "good" a journal is. I saw the article in the other thread and wondered how reliable the science was.