Clarivate Analytics, the global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to accelerate innovation, announced the 2018 update of its Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The latest update incorporates new analyses that offer richer, more detailed information to enhance users’ understanding of journal performance. These additional insights will help researchers, publishers, editors, librarians and funders to explore the key drivers of a journal’s value for diverse audiences, making better use of the data and metrics from the citation index database.
The JCR is the world’s most influential and trusted resource for evaluating peer-reviewed publications and is the leading source of annual journal metrics and indicators, including the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). The reports comprise citation data, impact and influence metrics and indicators and more than 90 million data points in Web of Science.
JCR 2018: What’s new?
The JCR relies on the core asset of the citation indexes (the same data the Web of Science is built on). This year, the JIF and other indicators have been significantly strengthened with article-level insights and a wide range of additional benefits including:
- Re-designed and enhanced journal profile pages: To better understand the content, regions, and institutions that make a journal influential
- Document-level transparency for the JIF and new indicators: To validate and understand the calculation of the JIF; identify the contribution of different content types to journal citation performance and see the journals and articles that influence journal performance
- Citation network expansion: Citations to JCR journals now include the contribution of the Book Citation Index
- New contextual information: The addition of geographical data of authors and a list of top contributing institutions, demonstrates the global community of the publication
Key highlights from the 2018 JCR
- 11,655 journal listings
- 234 disciplines
- 80 countries represented
- 276 journals received their first JIF
- 20 journals were suppressed to ensure the integrity of the reports. (14 for Journal Self-Citation, six for Citation Stacking) Suppressed journals are re-evaluated with each year’s data update for re-listing in the JCR
- Over 64 million references are reported in the JCR, with nearly 10 million in the JIF calculation alone
- The inclusion of all references from the 2017 content of the Book Citation Index accounted for 1.2 million Science citations (118 k in the JIF), and 303 k Social Sciences Citations (18 k in the JIF). While the numerical contribution of these books is small, the expansion of the citation network reported is significant, showing how books and journals function as integrated resources in scholarly communication
Figure 1: See the content and citations that define the impact profile of the journal
Annette Thomas, CEO, Scientific & Academic Research division at Clarivate Analytics said:
“Powerful, meaningful indicators when used responsibly, are a key component of the journal evaluation process for researchers, publishers and librarians. Clarivate combines world class data and high-powered analytics, with an entirely objective and publisher-neutral approach that enables us to continually evolve the JCR to cater for our users.”
Emmanuel Thiveaud, Managing Director, InCites, Clarivate Analytics added:
“The JCR has long been the gold standard for demonstrating journal performance. Citation data do offer unique and valuable insights on journal performance – but they are not the whole story. Journal ‘value’ is multi-faceted and researchers, editors, and publishers rely on additional information to evaluate a journal. This year, with the addition of contextual information at the journal level and the ability to view the individual items contributing to the JIF, the refreshed JCR delivers an enhanced user experience and offers a deeper understanding of the key drivers of a journal’s success.”
Find out more about this year’s Journal Citation Reports here. Follow us on Twitter via @WebofScience, #JournalCitationReports and #JournalImpactFactor.
