Impact Factor of Non-SCI journals

[Adam Finch]

Hi Prabir,

One could write a lot in response to your questions, so I'll try to keep it
brief.

1) I know of no websites that store the IFs of non-Science Citation Index
journals, other than the Social Science Citation Index journals that appear
on ISI's Journal Citation Report. However, Web of Science actually stores
all the citations from journals it indexes to any cited material. This means
you can construct a 'pseudo' Impact Factor. Because the non-SCI journal
won't be indexed, that pseudo Impact Factor will of course be missing self
citations, but you can trawl the journal's articles and put them back in if
you like. You can search for citations to any journal, including non-SCI
titles, in the Cited Reference Search area of Web of Science. Bear in mind
ISI will have abbreviated the titles, so you'll have to construct your seach
string carefully - see instructions on the site for more information.

2) The SJR is quite different to the Impact Factor in that it has a three
year rather than two year target window, ignores self citations and is, of
course, based on the Scopus dataset rather than the ISI one. More
importantly still, citations in the SJR are weighted according to the impact
of the citing journal. Can it give an indication of impact? Certainly. Is it
as useful as the Impact Factor? That's very much open to debate. Personally
I've had some issues with Scopus data quality but that may just be me, and
fewer people are aware of/prioritise the SJR. Also, without the ability to
deconstruct the SJR, we have no way of being sure it includes all relevant
citations.

3) Yes, as long as you don't try to compare one journal's IF with another
journal's SJR - they are very different metrics indeed and can't be placed
alongside one another meaningfully. If you intend to use a metric to publise
a journal, however, the IF is probably more useful because more people know
about it. Even Elsevier, as far as I know, don't often put the SJR of a
title on their journal homepages. Of course, a lot of stakeholders will only
take notice of an Impact Factor if it has been calculated by ISI themselves.

Hope this helps.

Best,

Adam


On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 5:17 PM, Prabir G. Dastidar <prabirgd11 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Adminstrative info for SIGMETRICS (for example unsubscribe):
> http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html Dear All,
> 1. Can you please suggest some websites to get the impact factors of
> Non-SCI journals? If there is any.
>
> 2. SCIMago gives journal rankings; to what extent it can be used to
> understand impact of a journal?
>
> 2.1 Can it be used in place of IF of JCR?
>
> I will be grateful for your suggestion.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Prabir
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> ..................................................
> Dr.P.G.Dastidar
> Scientist
> Ministry of Earth sciences,
> Mahasagar Bhawan,Block # 9 & 12,
> CGO Complex, Lodi Road,
> New Delhi- 110003
> INDIA.
>
> E-mail: prabirgd11 at gmail.com
> prabirgd11 at rediffmail.com
> *Telephone:* 91-11-24366130(O),
> 0120-2481046 (R)
> *FAX:* 011-24366130
> *Mobile:* 91-9868543999
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.asis.org/pipermail/sigmetrics/attachments/20110615/999ea35c/attachment.html>