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Nutrition: Journal Impact Factor and Bibliometrics

Introduction

Bibliometrics refers to the statistical analysis of written publications, such as books and articles. Alan Pritchard created the term in the late 1960's in his paper, Statistical Bibliography or Bibliometrics? Bibliometrics will help you understand how different journals, articles, and scholars are evaluated so that you can make informed decisions about where you would like your work published or what you should start to pay attention to as a scholar in academia. 

Citation Counts

The number and variety of citations a paper receives are often used as metrics to approximate that paper's influence in its field. A handful of databases provide tools that allow you to view or track citations to individual papers or to generate reports based on the citation statistics of a paper or group of papers. 

Nova Southeastern Unversity Libraries have access to two such databases:

  1. Web of Science (paid through our subscriptions)
  2. Google Scholar (open to everyone). 

Keep in mind: 

The citation information in these databases is based only on the information contained in those databases. In other words, a citation count in Web of Science indicates how many times that item was cited by other papers that are also in Web of Science. Citation metrics for individual papers may be different based on which database you use. Gather metrics from a variety of sources in order to get the most complete picture of a paper's influence.  

Tools

Use and Limitations of Bibliometrics

In this short video, Dr. Kevin Lalor, School of Social Sciences and Law, Dublin Institute of Technology, highlights some of the limitations of use of journal impact data in the social sciences and humanities and all the types of publication that are missed.

How to Find Impact Factor

First, you need to find the citation count of your research papers through citation databases and alternative metrics tools. They are key instruments that allow a user to understand the impact of an individual published paper or of a researcher's body of work. Citation databases and altmetrics tools can be used for the following:

  • To show the impact an article has by showing the number of times it has been cited since it was published.
  • To compile the references that the author of the publication used.
  • To identify and read the most influential publications in a particular field.
  • To find related work and to track the development of a certain publication.
It is important to note that not all databases have a complete record of information regarding a certain published item. It would be wise to use multiple databases to fully utilize this feature.

White Paper

Using Bibliometrics

 

A Guide to Evaluating Research Performance with Citation Data

"If you can measure that of which you speak, and can express it by a number, you know something of your subject; but if you cannot measure it, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory."

~ William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

Pendlebury, D. A. (n.d.). Using Bibliometrics in Evaluating Research (White Paper). Research Department, Thomson Reuters, Philadelphia, PA USA.
 
Ten Rules in Using Publication and Citation AnalysIs
  1. Consider whether available data can address the question.
  2. Choose publication types, field definitions, and years of data.
  3. Decide on whole or fractional counting.
  4. Judge whether data require editing to remove “artifacts”.
  5. Compare like with like.
  6. Use relative measures, not just absolute counts.
  7. Obtain multiple measures.
  8. Recognize the skewed nature of citation data.
  9. Confirm that the data collected are relevant to the question.
  10. Ask whether the results are reasonable.