| ERA journal rankings |
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The Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Initiative is being developed by the ARC. It will assess research quality within Australia’s higher education institutions using a combination of indicators and expert review by committees comprising experienced, internationally-recognised experts. John Lamp from the School of Information Systems at Deakin University has developed an ERA Journal Rankings Access which is to provide a quick, efficient access to the ERA journal ranking list. The ARC has released a new journal form. This form will need to be completed in order to request a journal for consideration in the relevant lists. The ARC will review the journal lists prior to the full implementation of ERA in 2010; this review will include the PCE and HCA Clusters.
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| What is an Impact Factor? |
Impact Factors were developed in the 1960s as a tool to help Libraries compare and rank journals. They are a product of Thomson Reuters (formerly ISI). If a journal has not been indexed by the Web of Science database for the last 3 years it does not have an Impact Factor. To find the Impact Factors of journals you use the database - Journal Citation Reports. The Impact Factor measures how often articles in a journal are cited. It measures how well journals perform. The 2008 Impact Factor calculates how often articles published in a journal in 2006 and 2007 are cited in 2008. That is, the Impact Factor is the average cites in one year per paper published in the previous two years. When using the Impact Factor to rank journals it is important to rank journals from the same discipline as citation patterns vary across disciplines. The use or misuse of Impact Factors as a tool to rank individual scientists is well documented. Thompson Reuters:
Read more How to find the impact factor of a journal Tutorial from Yale University Tutorial from Thomson Reuters Note that in some circumstances researchers may be asked about the impact factors of the journals they publish in. These should relate to the impact factors for the years in which the researcher published in the journal (not the current impact factor). |
| SCImago Journal Rank Indicator |
SCImago is the first world ranking that includes most Australian universities, government research organizations and health organizations. The full report was released September 28, 2009. SCImago Journal Rank indicator (SJR) ranks journals included in the Scopus database – 16,000 journals compared with 8,000 in the Impact Factor database – Journal Citation Reports. It calculates not only the number of citations to articles in journals but also takes into account the ‘quality’ of the citing journal. For example, if the item is cited by an article in Nature, it carries more weight than if the item is cited by an article in a lower-tier journal. SCImago is an open access database. Read more |
| Eigenfactor metrics |
Eigenfactor metrics computes two principles scores - the Eigenfactor Score and the Article Influence Score which take into account C. T. Bergstrom (Eigenfactor developer): "This iterative ranking scheme, which we call Eigenfactor, accounts for the fact that a single citation from a high-quality journal may be more valuable than multiple citations from peripheral publications. We measure the importance of a citation by the influence of the citing journal divided by the total number of citations appearing in that journal. This corrects for differences across disciplines and journals in the propensity to cite other papers. For example, a citation from a review article that has cursory references to large numbers of papers counts for less than a citation from a research article that cites only papers that are essentially related to its own argument. Eigenfactor measures the total influence of a journal on the scholarly literature or, comparably, the total value provided by all of the articles published in that journal in a year. This seems the appropriate metric for making subscription decisions. All else equal, larger journals will have more citations and larger Eigenfactor scores and will be visited more often by researchers. If, on the other hand, one wants to estimate the importance of an article by the company it keeps, the size of the journal in which it is published is not relevant. Instead one would want to measure the average influence of articles appearing in the same journal. The measure that we use as the Article Influence for a journal is proportional to the Eigenfactor divided by the number of articles. This measure is more directly comparable to ISI’s familiar Impact Factor." The Eigenfactor is an open access database or you can access the Eigenfactor data in the Journal Citation Reports (Impact Factor database). Read more: For more detailed information: |
| Arts & Humanities journals ranking |
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Thomson Reuters do not publish journal citation reports in the arts and humanities, so no impact factors are available for journals in these disciplines. These are some of the measures of quality used as a substitute in the arts and humanities: Arts and Humanities Citation Index Journal List
ERIH (European Reference Index for the Humanities)
Australian Public Affairs Information Service: List of comprehensively indexed journals
John Lamp from the School of Information Systems at Deakin University has developed an ERA Journal Rankings Access which provides a quick, efficient access to the ERA journal ranking list. There is access to the original draft list and the final list by Field of Research and by all or part of journal name. |
| Book rankings |
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In addition to journal rankings, there is also the question of book rankings. This is an issue in many disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, where books are an important medium for the publication of new research. Reviews in scholarly journals are probably the best guide to the quality of a book publication, but there are often long delays in the publication of such reviews. The ranking of publishers has been suggested as an alternative method for quickly evaluating book publications. However there are no widely accepted listings which rank publishers in various disciplines, and the Australian ERA initiative has abandoned its attempts to create publisher rankings. |
| University rankings using bibliometrics |
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World rankings of universities using bibliometrics Essential Science Indicators ranks worldwide Universities using number of papers published (productivity) and cites per paper (impact). It covers the latest 10 years and is updated every 2 months. More Web of Science can be used to rank and compare the publishing output of Universities, Institutes, or Schools within a University. It can also be used to compare and rank universities’ publishing output in specific subject fields. More Scopus can be used to search for publications of a University. It can also be used to compare and rank universities’ publishing output in specific subject fields. More The Webometrics Ranking of World Universities has been developed by the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain. This ranking makes use of a number of webometric measures. In the July 2009 Webometric World rankings, UQ is ranked 109 globally and 2nd in Oceania in these rankings. Other databases which include author affiliation usually only include the first author’s affiliation and can not be used to rank universities. |
| University rankings using other metrics |
There are two popular world rankings of universities. Academic Ranking of World Universities published by the Shanghai Jiao Tang Univeristy (SJTU) The ranking weights are: The THES-QS World University Rankings published by the Times Higher Education supplement and Quacquarelli Symonds The ranking weights are: Rankings of the Australian universities from both SJTU and THES–QS Review commenting on the rankings with an interesting reference list. Should you believe in the Shanghai ranking?, Jean-Charles Billaut, Denis Bouyssou et Philippe Vincke (April 2009). Internal report LI Tours. Popular guide
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