Skip to Main Content

Scholarly Communication: What tools does the Library Subscribe to that can help me evaluate journals?

The Scholarly Communications committee provides Bucknell’s faculty scholars with customized information, education, and guidance as well as the technical resources and support services needed throughout all steps of the scholarly communications process.

Two subscription assessment tools: Cabell’s and Journal Citation Index

 

Resource:

Cabell’s Journalytics



 

Journal Citation Reports (JCR)

About:

A curated list of journals with information about publication process and acceptance rates. Cabell’s allow you to compare metrics and information between journals and breaks metrics down by field for multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary journals. 

The keeper of “Impact Factor”, this Clarivate Analytics property (Previously Thomson Reuters, previously The Institute for Scientific Information) provides information about academic journals in the sciences and social sciences based on citation information gathered from the Science Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index.

Topic Coverage:

Cabell’s Journalytics includes close to 14,000 journals. Coverage is primarily in the life sciences, social sciences, and in business and education related fields. 

  • This resource primarily focuses on publications in the sciences (Over 9,000 journals)

  • Additional coverage in the Social Sciences (roughly 3,500 journals) and the Arts & Humanities (about 1,700 journals)

Evaluative Focus:

The Cabell’s review board invites and reviews applications from journals and evaluates the journals based on their listed criteria. 

This resource is primarily focused on citations as a measure of a journal’s relative impact within a field. 

Included (Non-comprehensive):

  • Disciplines publishing in and audiences of the journals.

  • Acceptance rate.

  • Overview of guidelines, review process, anticipated timeline.

  • Direct links to submission guidelines on journal website.

  • Influence metrics by fields (for instance, a journal may publish work in Finance, Economics, and Management, and may have different notoriety in each field).

  • Scite index and altmetric overview.

  • Journal Impact Factor and trends of past 5 years. 

  • Metric that place the impact factor into disciplinary context such as the Journal Citation Indicator (JCI), ranks within subject area, etc.

  • Median age of cited items.

  • Which journals cite most heavily from this journal and which journals this one cites most heavily from (relationships between journals).

  • Other citation metrics such as Eigenfactor, 5 year impact factor, and immediacy index.

Popular ways to use:

  • You can search by journal title or ISSN to learn about a specific journal.

  • You can search the name of a discipline to see titles publishing disciplinary research.

  • You can use filters to see all titles by discipline, metric reports, current call for papers, OA policies, etc.

  • You can search by journal title or ISSN to learn about a specific journal. 

  • You can browse by group or category to see journals ranked by citation information compared to others that might publish on the same topic.

For more information:

Visit the “About” Journalytics page.

Visit the Clarivate guide on this resource or reach out to your scholarly communications team.

Both tools have strengths and limitations. It is important to consider the limitations of indexes and metrics. Both tools can be a part of your strategy of evaluating journals and shaping your research agenda, as you are preparing a manuscript and choosing the journal that you would like to submit to. Of course, it is important to keep in mind that these resources are not comprehensive and there are excellent journals that appear in neither tool.

Additional resource, Cabell’s Predatory Reports

While Cabell’s Journalytics and Clarivate’s Journal Citation Index provides information about publications that have been vetted for quality, Cabell’s Predatory Reports is meant to provide a list of publications that engage in potentially predatory practices.

If a title appears in the Predatory Reports list, you will be able to see the reasons it has been flagged and visit the journal website as part of your independent assessment. It is important to keep in mind that this resource is not comprehensive and there are spectrums of predatory practices in academic publishing.