Journal Citations and Impact Factor
Last week, I talked about H-Index which is a metric for measuring the impact an author has in his field. This week, I will discuss Impact Factor (IF) which is one way to measure the impact a journal has in a field. Impact Factors for a journal are available through Journal Citation Reports which is produced by the same company that produces Web of Knowledge. The simple impact factor for a journal in any given year is the average number of citations in that year of articles from the previous two years. So if a journal has an impact...
H-Index
As I mentioned last week, I decided that there wasn’t enough interesting about controlled vocabulary to fill up a whole month of posts so I’ve decided to switch topics for this week and next to journal metrics. The first metric I’m using in some research I’m conducting with a professor, and it’s called the H-Index. H-Index was originally introduced by J.E. Hirsch as one way of measuring an author’s impact on his field. The way it works is you order the author’s papers from the most to least cited paper along the x-axis. Then you graph on the y-axis...