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Drexel Library

Scholarly Impact Measures: Home

Frequently used for promotion and tenure decisions

Journal Directories

Ulrichs is a comprehensive listing of all periodicals, including expired titles and very specialized small circulation newsletters. It is most useful for searching narrow keywords to know you have identified all the multiple titles available in a specialized area. It may also be helpful for finding what online databases carry full text or indexed content from a particular journal.
 

Use Cases

Scholarly impact evaluation may be useful in the context of:

Accreditation - a process involving self and peer assessment to improve public accountability toward and to improve academic quality

Institutional Research - benchmarking institutional performance against that of peer institutions

Overviews - of the research enterprise

Program Alignment and Review -  an initiative of the Provost's Office to periodically review each college and department

Scholarly Impact: Definition

Determining a Single Author or Journal's Impact

How to use WoS to gain assess a journal's impact in a specific subject area:
1.) After choosing terms carefully, perform a keyword search on your topic of interest.
2.) Use the left-hand filter options to:
- filter for "Document Type" = journal article (and hit "refine" button)
- Use the "show more options" button at the bottom of the list of left-hand side filters
- Expand the "Source Titles" option and click the "more options/values" link
3.) On the resulting new window, you will have a ranked list of journal titles that have had articles on the topic of your initial keyword search.

How to use WoS to gain assess a author's impact in a specific subject area:
Perform a similar series of steps as described above. Only instead of expanding the "Source Titles" option, use the "Authors" option instead.

An alternate approach to achieving similar results uses the Journal Citation Reports.

Evaulating at the Department, College or University Level

Due to a steep learning curve, this InCites tool is recommended only for institutional assessment, not the evaluation of individual researchers or journals. Users are required to create an account or use an existing Web of Science account to access the platform. Starting points follow. The best recommendation for getting started is to contact your Liaison Librarian to schedule a live demonstration

EXAMPLES:

InCites Overview by Top 20 Research Areas for All Drexel Author Articles Indexed in WoS 2009-2016

Drexel_Articles_by_Research_Category_2009-2016

 

InCites Overview by Top 10 Journals for Citations to Drexel Articles Indexed in WoS 2009-2016

InCites Overview of Drexel Article Count by Journal Title 2009-2016

These examples produced 12/5/2016.
Reporting such as this can also be delivered as links to self-updating dashboards.