education research: journal rankings and citation reports

Education Research: Journal Rankings and Citation Reports

• Your impacto Google Scholaro Publish or Perisho Web of Science

• Where to publisho “Best” journalso How to find them

• Along the wayo Discussion: How to raise profile of Education

journals/research? Or does it matter?

author impact, citation impact

journal impact

Assessing author/article impact

• Why?o Promotion/tenure

• How much have I published? Have my articles, etc. been cited? By whom? How often?

o Trace your (or someone else’s) research over time

o Find out the big names/big ideas

• How?o Tools like Google Scholar, Publish or Perish,

Web of Science, etc.

Google Scholar• Freely available; easy to use• Generally better coverage of social

sciences• Gives the big picture; the general idea• More current• Gives equal rank to everything • Inflated citation counts? or • What’s missing?

Get citations for non-journal materials (books, videos)

Harzing’s Publish or Perish• Uses Google Scholar data• Software download (

http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm#download)

• H-indexo a scholar with an index of h has published h

papers with at least h citations each (Jorge E. Hirsch)

o reflects both the number of publications and the number of citations per publication rather than simply total number of citations

Publish or Perish

H-index: 13M. Wesch has published 13 papers each of which has been cited in other papers at least 13 times.

Publish or Perish• Provides a way to manipulate Google

Scholar data

Web of Science• Impact of article/citation

oNumber of times cited

Web of Science• Cited Reference Searching

o to find articles whose authors cited your publications

o only includes citations from its core list of journals

All the articles that cited Nodding’s 2005 article in Educational Leadership:

Citation report

Use WoS to see all citations to one author

Keeping track…• Create citation alerts

Journal Impact• Why?

o Where should I publish? o What does it mean that my colleague/student/

new hire published in journal X?o How do I find out more about journal quality?

• How?o Journal Citation Reports(WoS) o H-index and other article-level toolso Cabell’s Publishing Directories

Journal Citation Reports• Standard source for journal rankings• Impact factor

o average number of citations received per paper published in that journal during the two preceding years

• Education is not well-represented• WoS: “…covering less than ten percent of

the journals in education” (Corby, 2008)

JCR

Does this reflect your view of “the best” journals?

• Problems with JCR/Impact factoro Only indexes highest quality, most

influential journalso Has roots in sciences (Corby, 2001)

o Pure/hard subjects have higher impact factors than soft/applied (Goodyear et al., 2009)

o Education is interdisciplinary by nature; education publishing more diverse (Goodyear et al., 2009)

Goodyear et al., 2009• Identified 11 primary journals

Where else?• Journal impact:

o Eigenfactoro SCImago Journal and Country RankoGoogle Scholar: Metrics

• Info about journals:oDirectory of Open Access JournalsoUlrichsweb

SCImago Journal and

Country Rank

Google Scholar Metrics

Where to publish?• Journal impact just one way to assess

journal• Other considerations:

o Peer-review? (Ulrichsweb)o Publisher/editorial board (well-known?)o Acceptance rates (Cabell’s)o Scope/ good fito High-visibility: Where is it indexed?

(Klingner, 2005)o Open access?

Ulrich’s• Peer-review, info about journal…

Cabell’s• Acceptance rates, type of review,

etc.

Publisher/journal websites• Submission guidelines, contact info, etc.

Search in article

database

Summary• Many tools available• Relying on just one: inaccurate

picture?• Use several tools/strategies to tell

more accurate story about a researcher/author

• Use several tools/strategies to select journal for publication

• Ask your Librarian for help

For more info and help…

• Graduate Education Research Guideo http://researchguides.library.brocku.ca/EDUCGraduate

• Jennifer Thiesseno jthiessen@brocku.cao Ext. 3573

• Open Access Week Oct. 22-26o Sessions from 12-1 every day (more details on library

website)