Tutorials - Howe Library

Journal Impact Factor is one metric provided by Web of Science's Journal Citation Reports.

In order to find a journal's impact factor, you'll first need to log in to Web of Science.

Go to the library's homepage to log in.

If you're off-campus, first click on "Connect from Off-Campus."

Then, click on Research Databases and "W" to jump down the list by title.

Once you're in Web of Science, look for the tabs at the top of the screen and click on "Journal Citation Reports."

You're now in Journal Citation Reports. You can enter a specific journal title into the search bar, or you can browse by journal title or category.

Let's do a search for the journal "Exceptional Children."

The impact factor appears on the left and below it you can see how the journal impact factor was calculated.

You can see that current journal impact factors are created from previous years' data.

Journal impact factor for a given year is calculated by looking at the total number of citations in a given year to articles published in the previous two years. That number of citations is then divided by the total number of articles a journal has produced over that two year period. This provides an average of how many times an article published in a given journal has been cited.

In this example, you can see that articles published in Exceptional Children in 2016 and 2017 were cited a total of 137 times in 2018. This number is then divided by the total number of articles published in Exceptional Children over the two year span - 48. So, 137 citations divided by 48 articles published equates to a journal impact factor of 2.854.

If you scroll further down the page, you will also see two variants on the Journal Impact Factor.

The first attempts to account for self-citation by elminating self-citations from the equation, and the second provides a longer lookback period which gives an article more time to garner recognition and build a citation count.

These are the basics of finding a journal's impact factor. If you have other questions, just ask your librarian at the UVM Libraries.

If you want to know what items you have checked out from the library, you can see your library account online.

To see your account, select “Renew Library Materials” from the Services menu.

If you are a UVM student, faculty member or staff member, please click the first link to sign-in with your UVM NetID.

If you do not have a NetID, use the second link to log-in with your last name and library barcode.

Once you are logged in to CATQuest, select “Loans” to display a list of all of the items you currently have checked out.

Click on Renew to renew any item. You can also use the menu to see items you have requested, any fees and more.

Please contact the library with any questions.