
Which journals in my area have the highest impact?
Subject categorisation
Journal titles are assigned to one or more subject categories in the JCR. This means a journal can be ranked differently depending on the category being reviewed. Differences also occur between resources. The following table highlights this issue in relation to three journal titles.
Source title | Ranking in JCR/WOS | Ranking in Scopus/SciMap |
Plant Biosystems | 120/156 in Plant Sciences | 90/291 in Plant Science |
Waste Management | 7/38 in Engineering, Environmental 44/163 in Environmental Sciences |
1/92 in Geotechnical Engineering and Engineering Geology |
Ecological Economics | 19/209 in Economics (Social Sciences Edition) 6/58 in Environmental Studies (Social Sciences edition) 53/124 in Ecology (Sciences edition) 60/163 in Environmental Sciences (Sciences edition) |
63/157 in Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics |
Discipline differences
Citation practices can vary significantly from one field to another. For example, articles in biochemistry often contain over 50 cited references, while a typical mathematical paper has perhaps only 10. This difference explains why biochemical papers are cited so much more often than mathematical ones. The traditional impact factor cannot therefore be used to compare journals across different subject areas. SNIP (see 3.3) is an advanced citation indicator that corrects for such differences.
Discipline differences are highlighted in the following table:
Source title | JCR impact factor 2009 |
American historial review | 2.114 |
Review of educational research | 3.326 |
Annals of mathematics | 4.174 |
Journal of economic literature | 6.919 |
Nature photonics | 22.869 |
Annual review of immunology | 37.902 |
New England journal of medicine | 47.050 |
These journals all have the highest impact factor in their category.
My RI by University College Dublin, Dublin City University, Dublin Institute of Technology, The National University
of Ireland, Maynooth and the NDLR adapted by Marion Kelt, Glasgow Caledonian University is licensed
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Based on a work at http://www.ndlr.ie/myri/.