BGGN 2xx - Biology Resources for Graduate Students: Impact Factors

 Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters Scientific) analyzes journal citation patterns to determine impact factors. The Journal Citation Reports (JCR) for Sciences  and Social Sciences journals compile these data into ranked lists of journals. These values are used to estimate the importance of individual journals relative to other titles in their field.

Common Use Cases: 

• Finding the Journal Impact Factor for a particular journal: search the name of the journal. 
• Finding a ranked list of journals in a discipline: use Browse Categories and navigate to the lowest level. You may see two listings for your discipline, one labelled "ESCI" in the "Edition" field. This is a new feature covering "emerging" journals and is not complete.

The UC San Diego Library's online subscription to the JCR covers 1997 forward.

Journal Impact Factor is one metric for research impact, but it is quite limited and doesn't relate directly to the impact of an individual researcher or an individual article.  Please check out these guides for more information on metrics: 

Research Impact Metrics guide

• Author Metrics
• Bibliometrics and Alt-Metrics

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