Increasing the impact of journal articles

Laura JeffreyResearcher Training Librarian

Course outline

• Importance of getting your research read• Individual citations• Where to publish

– High ranking: journal citation reports– Improving your citation count: Open Access and

repositories• Optimising titles and abstracts

Getting your research read

• Making research visible• Why?

– Establishing research profile– Research Evaluation Framework

• How?– Reputable publishing routes– New routes – Networks

(2008) Taylor and Francis LibSite Newsletter, issue 9. p. 2

(2008) Taylor and Francis LibSite Newsletter, issue 9. p. 3

Citations to individual papers

• Links between papers that have something in common

• Building on or challenging research• Tool to make connections• Help make a judgement about impact an

article has made• Sum of citations useful indication of impact of

an author

Web of Science

• Eugene Garfield first published the idea of measuring citations in 1955

• Science Citation Index (now forms part of WoS) developed to highlight “formal, explicit linkages between papers that have particular points in common” i.e. information retrieval

• Shift in use of data to measure impact of research

(2008) Taylor and Francis LibSite Newsletter, issue 9. p. 5

Science subjectsSocial-science subjects

Google Scholar

• Data for broader range of documents e.g. books

• Broader range of documents contribute to higher number of citations

• More useful for recent documents• Useful for subjects not covered by ISI• More comprehensive in some areas• Trace developments/versions of same paper

Publishers

• List of references • Can pull citation data from other providers• Some link to references and cited works• Alerts depend on citation in another journal

published by same publisher

Measuring & monitoring citations

• Counting citations – WoS , JStor, SD, publishers and GS

• Linked references – WoS, JStor, SD, publishers• Citation alerts –WoS, SD, publishers and GS• Cited Reference Search – WoS • Citation Report – WoS • Map citations to find related material – WoS

Citation terminology

• g-index– The highest number (g) of papers that together received g2

or more citations – a researcher with a g-index of, say, 10 has published 10

papers that together have been cited at least 100 times

• h-index– An author’s number of articles (h) that have received at

least h citations – a researcher with an h-index of 10 has published 10

articles that have each been cited at least 10 times

Activity

• Use Web of Science to try a citation search and report

• How do the number of citations vary using Google Scholar?

• Can you trace these from the publisher’s website?

Journal impact – JCR

• Uses citations to measure impact of a journal, mainly for science and social science subjects

• Impact factor = average number of citations in a year given to those papers in a journal that were published during the two preceding years

• A journal that is cited once, on average, for each article published has an JIF of 1.

Impact factor

Citations in 2008 (in journals indexed in Web of Knowledge) to all articles

published by Journal X in 2007 & 2008

Number of articles (deemed to be citable by Web of Knowledge) that were

published in Journal X in 2007 & 2008

Journal X’s 2009 impact factor

=

Web of Knowledge

Median age of the articles that were cited in the JCR year. Half of a journal's cited articles were published more recently than the cited half-life.

Average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year.

Average number of times an article is cited in the year it is published.

Total number of cites to the journal in JCR year

Journal impact – Eigenfactor

• Uses ISI data• Get scores based on broader algorithms• Uses variety of document types• Demonstrates connections between Sciences

and Social Sciences• Visualisations – interactive browser useful for

publishing in another disciplinesEigenfactor

Journal impact – SCImago

• Uses data from SCOPUS• Average number of weighted citations

received in given in SJR year by documents published in preceding three years.

• Ranking weights article cited in high ranking journal rather than treating all citations the same

Scimago

Activity

• Look up a journal or subject area on Journal Citation Report on Web of Knowledge

• Use Eigenfactor or SCImago to look at different types of ranking available

Open Access Publishing• Open Access movement

– making publicly funded (and other) research freely available

– Research Councils and other funders’ mandates, see JULIET

• Journals – Open Access Journal = free for all OR charge for

outgoing articles – DOAJ, Journal Info

Open Access Publishing• Repositories

– General listing: OpenDOAR– Subject: arXiv– Institutional: Durham Research Online (DRO)– See RoMEO, find out if a publisher allows deposit

• Harvesters – OAIster– DRIVER– Google Scholar – not just OA material

Activity

• Use JULIET to find your funder or one in your subject area

• Look at subject or institutional repository or harvester for relevant research articles

Optimising your title & abstract• Improve ranking in databases and search engines• Human decision-making• Easier to find = more likely to be read = more

likely to be cited• Downloads beginning to count as impact• Construct a clear, descriptive title• Reiterate key phrases in the abstract

Wiley Blackwell guidelineshttp://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/seo.asp

Australia's Forgotten VictimsEver since the British colonists in Australia became aware of the disappearance of the indigenous peoples in the 1830s, they have contrived to excuse themselves by pointing to the effects of disease and displacement. Many colonists called for the extermination of Aborigines when they impeded settlement by offering resistance, yet there was no widespread public acknowledgement of this as a policy until the later 1960s, when a critical school of historians began serious investigations of frontier violence. Their efforts received official endorsement in the 1990s, but profound cultural barriers prevent the development of a general awareness of this. Conservative and right-wing figures continue to play down the gravity of what transpired. These two aspects of Australian public memory are central to the political humanisation of the country.

Genocide and Holocaust Consciousness in Australia

Ever since the British colonists in Australia became aware of the disappearance of the indigenous peoples in the 1830s, they have contrived to excuse themselves by pointing to the effects of disease and displacement. Yet although genocide was not a term used in the nineteenth century, extermination was, and many colonists called for the extermination of Aborigines when they impeded settlement by offering resistance. Consciousness of genocide was suppressed during the twentieth century until the later 1960s, when a critical school of historians began serious investigations of frontier violence. Their efforts received official endorsement in the 1990s, but profound cultural barriers prevent the development of a general genocide consciousness. One of these is Holocaust consciousness, which is used by conservative and right-wing figures to play down the gravity of what transpired in Australia. These two aspects of Australian public memory are central to the political humanisation of the country.

Conclusions

• Different resources will give different results for author and publication impact

• Citations can be a useful indication as the impact of an article or author

• Journal rankings give an idea of which journals are cited most frequently

• Open Access increases reach of research• Need to consider what will attract readers

Evaluation

Please fill in the evaluation form – your comments are greatly appreciated

For more information contact Laura Jeffrey – l.k.s.jeffrey@durham.ac.uk– 0191 3341586