Lesson 29. Top International Journals Ranking by Categories: JCR (WoS)
What are the ways to identify top journals in the category of your research? For this purpose you can use Web of Science and Scopus databases. We will discuss the features of this kind of search in two lessons.
Web of Science (WoS) is a comprehensive international interdisciplinary research citation indexing platform. Its origin goes back to 1964 when Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) pioneered Science Citation Index under the supervision of Eugene Garfield, the founder of bibliometrics and scientometrics. In 2017 Clarivate Analytics took over the ISI traditions and developing new bibliometric tools.
The module “Journal Citation Reports” (JCR) within WoS platform features the top world journals (more than 12,500 sources) by 236 categories. JCR allows evaluating journals by several criteria, among them impact factor of a journal (IF)*. IF is the most widely used scientometric index of an academic journal basing on which a journal Quartile is determined**. It is possible to compare journals by Impact Factor only in one research category. Whereas, quartile (a journal rank) allows comparing journals in different categories.
JCR is in UrFU paid subscription. For the period of pandemic UrFU community can access it through EZproxy remote access system or by a personal account after registration in WoS from UrFU network (usually it is valid for 6 months, afterwards it must be prolonged within UrFU corporate network). See more details about access possibilities on the site https://www.clarivate.ru/, about JCR: https://www.clarivate.ru/products/journal-citation-reports/, and about all the products of Clarivate Analytics in tutorial videos on the official channel Web of Science по-русски | Обучение и тренинги (Web of Science in Russian. Tutorials).
In JCR you can browse by journal title (full or abbreviation) in a basic search box. You can also browse by category by clicking the icon “Browse by Category”. The icon “Browse by Journal” allows you to make a search by a title, a country or a publisher; additionally you can refine your search by Quartile ranking, SCIE (Science Citation Index Expanded) or SSCI (Social Sciences Citation Index) WoS Core Collection, the Open Access mark, Impact Factor (IF) range or a certain year, and other criteria.
Further on we overview 5 simple steps of searching top international journals by JCR categories.
STEP 1. Sign in in Web of Science by a personal account and follow the link “Journal Citation Reports” on the header (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Homepages of Web of Science and JCR
STEP 2. On the home page of JCR click the button “Browse by Category” and select the necessary category in the appeared menu. By default, the categories are listed in descending order of the journals included into the category. The presentation of categories can be changed by clicking the “Category” button after which the list will be arranged in alphabet. Ctrl-F hotkey switches between the ways of order of the list.
You can also select a desired category on the left side bar by clicking “Select Categories” after which tick the category (for example, the category «INFORMATION SCIENCE & LIBRARY SCIENCE») and click the «Submit» button.
Figure 2. Profile of the category «INFORMATION SCIENCE & LIBRARY SCIENCE»
Figure 3. The list of the journals in the category «INFORMATION SCIENCE & LIBRARY SCIENCE»
STEP 4. The journals are arranged in a descending order of the impact factor indicator (see Figure 3). The search results can be downloaded by selecting a corresponding option on the header (see Figure 4).
Figure 4. Download function
STEP 5. The profile of each journal (switch by clicking a journal’s title) supplies the information on a publisher, International Standard Serial Number and electronic International Standard Serial Number — ISSN, e-ISSN, the publication language, publication frequency, and some other data (see figure 5).
Figure 5. Journal Profile
Publisher name allows identifying inclusion of this source into the university subscription (see Lesson 20), which, consequently, gives the possibility of full-text reading of the most influential world’s journals.
* Journal Impact Factor (IF) is a scientometric index of an academic journal importance calculated as the ratio between the number of citations received in a certain year (for example, 2018) and the total number of citable publications in that journal during the two preceding years (2016-2017). This index is calculated by Clarivate Analytics for the journals included into SCIE (Science Citation Index Expanded) and SSCI (Social Sciences Citation Index) WoS Core Collection (WoS CC). Therefore, it may be concluded that not all the journals indexed in Web of Science Core Collection necessarily have Impact Factor in JCR.
** JCR Journal Quartile (Q, Quartile) — as a result of ranking by Impact Factor each journal is referred to one of the four quartiles: Q1, Q2, Q3 or Q4. Q1 is the highest Quartile; the most authoritative journals are included into Q1and Q2Qhartiles.