Subject Guides
Citation Analysis & Metrics
Locate impact factors and related measures, how to locate where and how often authors and articles are cited, and how to create scholar profiles.
Guide Contents
Impact Factors (Journal Citation Reports)
The Impact Factor for a journal represents the citation rate over a given time period for an average article in a given journal. A journals' impact factor is one of the measures used to measure journals' importance (or impact) in its field.
Impact Factors are found in the Web of Science using the Journal Citation Report tool.
1. Select a year, edition, and viewing option:
- by subject category, publisher, or country. Subject Category contains sub-fields of disciplines identified by Thomson Reuters. Multiple categories can be selected using the Shift key.
- by individual title
- all journals in the Science or Social Science editions (Impact Factors are not available for journals indexed in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index.)
2. Select the sort option for your data.
3. The results screen lists the journal title, ISSN, Journal Citation Report data (including the one year and five year impact factors), and Eigenfactor Metrics.
4. Results can be re-sorted using the Sorted Again: drop-down menu on the top left of the screen.
In order to print or save file, mark the records, then click on "Update Marked List." You will then be able to format the list to print or save to a .txt file.
Why can't I find a journal?
WoS uses a selective process to determine what journals it covers.
For other sources for some of the same metrics used in WoS, see Metrics.
