Journals with Impact Factors - how representative are they of the scholarly literature?

How representative are journals titles with Impact Factors compared to all academic journals in a given area of study.

The following is a quick and simple comparison for Management which I think gives some idea.

• The ISI Journal Citation Reports lists 79 journal titles with Impact Factors under the subject heading Management;
• Ulrich's Periodicals Directory lists 494 under the subject heading Management which are also refereed academic/scholarly journals;
• 57 of the titles included in the ISI Journal Citation Reports are also included in the 494 journal titles identified by Ulrich's – so there is some basis for comparing the two data sets.

Using a very rough and ready calculation comparing the two sets of data - 79/494 - there are 6 refereed academic Management journals for every Management title that has an Impact Factor.

A similar exercise for Nursing gives a similar result.

• The ISI Journal Citation Reports lists 32 journal titles with Impact Factors under the subject heading Nusing;
• Ulrich's Periodicals Directory lists 213 under the subject heading Medical Sciences - Nurses and Nursing which are also refereed academic/scholarly journals;
• All the titles included in the ISI Journal Citation Reports are also included in the 213 journal titles identified by Ulrich's – so there is a strong basis for comparing the two data sets.

Using the same rough calculation comparing the two sets of data - 32/213 - there are 6.6 (or 7 rounded up) refereed academic Nursing journals for every Nursing title that has an Impact Factor.

Mac Users of EndNote XI - Cite While You Write problem

Office 2008 for Mac was released in January 2008. EndNote (any version) is not compatible with Word 2008 due to changes with its third-party add-in connectivity. Thomson Scientific is actively working on an update to restore Cite While You Write compatibility for EndNote X1. Please stay tuned for more information, or register to be notified when the update is available. The update will be free to all registered EndNote X1 for Mac users. You may register at:

http://www.endnote.com/support/enregister.asp

To use EndNote with Word 2008 today, follow the steps below:
- Open your document in Word 2004 or X.
- Select the Cite While You Write option to "Unformat Citations"
- Save the document as a RTF file (do not save as a .doc or docx file)
- Open EndNote and select Tools menu > "Format Paper" ("RTF Document Scan" in version 9 and earlier) to generate a new document with the formatted citations and bibliography. If you no longer have Word 2004/X on your machine, our technical support team is pleased to assist you with unformatting your citations.

Technical Support

Thank you,

The EndNote team

Thomson Scientific

How can BURO increase the visibility of my research?

BURO can help increase the visibility of your research by increasing the chances of it being ‘discovered’ others. It does this in two ways.

BURO lets staff, students and researchers within the University see your publications. They can also do this for Research Centres and Schools using the Browse button on BURO to click through to lists of publications by School and Research Centre. They can search by author using BURO's Search and Advanced Search functions to identify publications by an individual. Before BURO there was no central repository of publications to allow others to see the University's published research activity.

BURO is an 'institutional repository' based on Eprints software. It allows Bournemouth University to participate in projects which aggregate the content institutional repositories in the UK, Europe and internationally.

• INTUTE – British university repositories. You can search this – Bournemouth is a member so you can search for your own content here
  [ http://www.intute.ac.uk/irs ]


• DRIVER – European university/ research repositories. Project Information Only
  [ http://www.driver-repository.eu ]


• OAIster – ‘international’ repository search tool.
  [ http://www.oaister.org ]


• BASE -Bielefeld Academic Search Engine [BASE].
  [ http://www.base-search.net ]

These projects increase the visibility of BURO, by allowing end users of repository search engines an opportunity to ‘discover’ BURO's content.

Google Scholar and citations

Google Scholar can be used to track citations to your publications using the Cited by feature. Search Google Scholar scholar.google.com for an article you have written. It helps to use the Advanced Search to make your search as precise as possible. For example combining a surname (Author) with keywords from the title (with all of the words). If Google Scholar locates your article click on the Cited by link where present to see who has cited you in their own paper.

You can learn:

• if your article has been cited even though it does not appear in ISI's Citation Indexes;
• who is citing you? What aspects of your article are they picking up?
• how many times have you been cited? Rank your articles in order of citation counts.

Results need to be treated with care:

• Google Scholar will find citations in forms of publication e.g. PowerPoints, conference papers and unpublished papers as well as multiple citations to the same reference. This will inflate your citation count;
• there is no consistent overlap between ISI Citation Indexes. ISI will find citations not on Google Scholar and vice versa - there have been a number of research studies to demonstrate this;
• there is no way of knowing which publications and publishers are excluded from Google.

The ISI Citation Indexes remain the 'gold standard' for citations. Google Scholar does provide good intelligence especially where publications are not in the ISI Citation Indexes.

Who is citing me?

Citations measure the number of times a publication written by you has been cited by others. The more an item has been cited the more 'important' it is thought to be within the literature.

There are some qualifications. Articles should be published in a substantial scholarly journal. Citation counts also work for other forms of literature such as books and book chapters. Generally it takes 1 - 3 years before a published piece of research is cited by others, the time it takes for an author to research and write an article, book or book chapter.

Citation counts are higher in the Sciences than the Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities. Having a citation count at all might be considered and achievement. Some publications attract citation counts in the 100's. For example,

• Kuhlthau, C.C., 1993. Seeking meaning: a process approach to Library and Information Services. Norwood, NJ : Ablex. has been cited over 222 times.


• Holland, M. 1997. Diffusion of innovation theories and their relevance to understanding the role of librarians when introducing users to networked information. The Electronic Library 5 (15), 389-394. has been cited once.
  

Citations can be measured using the ISI Citation Indexes (Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index; Arts and Humanities Citation Index). There is a two stage process of finding your publication in the database, then finding who has cited it. There is a guide to Citation Searching on the Library website.

Should be noted that citation analysis and is far more complex than the simple process dercibed here. However, citations are drawing attention because some form of citation analysis will be part of the next iteration of Research Assessment Exercise [RAE] / Research Excellence Framework [REF].

Links

Research Excellence Framework - HEFCE
Citations and Scientific Indexing - article in Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology
The use of bibliometrics to measure research quality in UK higher education institutions - Universities UK

Journal Impact Factors

Journal Impact Factors provide a numeric measure of the 'quality' of journals using a simple calculation, the sum of published articles in the previous two years divided by the number of times articles in that journal have been cited in the current year. For example:

Number of articles in the Journal of Advanced Studies

2004   2005

20  +  20   = 40

Number of times articles the Journal of Advanced Studies published in 2004/5 have been cited by others in 2006

2004   2005

40  +  40   = 80

The Impact Factor is:

80/40 = 2.0

Impact Factors are calculated using data provided by the ISI Citation Indexes and presented in a separate database called the Journal Citation Reports. The Journal Citation Reports provide Impact Factors for individual titles and groups of tiles by subject in two databases Science and Social Sciences.

Impact Factors should be read with care.

• Impact Factors are higher in the Sciences than the Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities. It is not appropriate to compare Impact Factors across disciplianry areas.


• Newly created journal titles will not have Impact Factors in their first three years of publication.


• Multi disciplinary areas of study are not well served by Impact Factors. Impact Factors favour established journals that fall within traditional disciplinary boundaries.


• In some discipline areas, very few journal titles have Impact Factors compared with the total number of titles published, for example 'management' or 'business'. Journals with Impact Factors represent only a small amount of scholaly activity.

Although Impact Factors are crude in many ways, their wide acceptance means that they are a key measure of performance. Publishing in a journal title with an Impact Factor, or in a journal title that has a higher Impact Factor than other titles in the field is considered 'better'.


Links

Wikipedia article
Impacts Factors - essay by Dr. Eugene Garfield, Thompson ISI

DOI - Digital Object Identifier and BURO

Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) are unique and persistent numbers given to digital objects, for example files containing the full text of journal articles published online. They do not give an objects location but can be used to find an object on the Internet using the DOI resolver located at http://dx.doi.org.

You will notice that DOI's are appearing in the records of the databases of major journal publishers, for example ScienceDirect and Emerald Insight. If you publish an article in a scholarly journal it will be assigned a DOI. You can use this to import information into BURO to save on keyboarding.

Login to BURO
Go to Manage Deposits
Go to Import Items
Copy in your DOI using this syntax DOI:10.1108/00220410810844132
BURO will upload basic bibliographic data for you to edit.

Just a couple of other things you should check. The select import format should be set to DOI (via CrossRef), and it is good practice to Test before Importing.

Links

DOI article in Wikipedia
DOI Resolver http://dx.doi.org
DOI Home Page http://doi.org

EndNote and BURO

Tired of being asked for lists of your publications? BURO can now export results into a number of formats including EndNote and BibTex. There is a guide to exporting from BURO to EndNote here. You can then use the output styles in EndNote to reformat your publication lists as required.

BURO - RSS Feed

Want to know who is publishing what in your School / Research Centre? You can set up an RSS Feed from BURO to get the information delivered to your RSS Reader.

It is a little clumsy in some browsers so if you are using IE (Internet Explorer) 6.0 follow these instructions.

Right click on the RSS feed you want (Atom, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0)

Copy Short Cut

Paste the Short Cut into your RSS Reader.

If you are not sure what an RSS Reader is there is some information for you here.

Bournemouth University Research Online - BURO - now in V3.0

You may notice that there have been some changes. BURO has been upgraded from Version 2.0 of the Eprints software to Version 3.0. There are a number of improvements - especially an easier process to add new records/documents.

If you haven't used BURO before it is probably best that you start from the BURO Home page here. There is a beginners guide and links to other useful documents and websites. Regular users can drop straight into BURO at http://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk.

Bournemouth University Harvard EndNote File Updated

If you are using the Bournemouth University Harvard EndNote template, please check the EndNote Support page to make sure that you have the latest version of the Harvardbu.ens style. The most recent version contains minor corrections to the way names and dates are included in the text.