Creating Citation Reports

This page provides an overview of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and step-by-step instructions for using Journal Citation Reports to: 

• Find the JIF for one journal 
• Build a JIF report that includes multiple journals 

If you have questions or need help troubleshooting, contact HSLS Publishing Services. 

The JIF is a journal citation metric from Clarivate and only available through Journal Citation Reports. Its calculation is a ratio of the number of times that articles from a journal have been cited, and the number of citable items published in the journal. The JIF uses publication data from the previous two years.

Important notes about the JIF:

• Only journals indexed in the Web of Science have a JIF. Journals recently added to Web of Science might not have a JIF yet.
• The JIF cannot be used to compare journals across different subject categories because of the differences in citation patterns across fields. To compare journals across fields fairly, use the JIF quartiles or JIF rank within a discipline instead.
• JIFs are updated once a year, usually in the summer, after a full year of citation data has been captured and calculated.
• To measure the academic impact of an article, use article-level metrics such as times cited or altmetrics instead. Learn more on the library’s guide for Measuring Research Impact.

1. Access Journal Citation Reports.
2. Search for the journal by its name or ISSN.
3. If the journal has a JIF, it will be displayed in the Journal’s performance section. If you need the JIF for previous years, click View all years below the Journal Impact Factor Trend graph.

Get a list of journal ISSN numbers

If the journals you’re looking up are based on a Web of Science citation report, you can export the ISSNs from the Web of Science search results page. This also works if you do a keyword search and you’re at the search results page.

If you already have a list of ISSN numbers, you can skip ahead to the Build a Report in JCR section.

From the citation report, click on the link for the number of total publications. This will bring you to the search results page.

 

At the top of the search results page, click on the Export dropdown menu and select the option for Excel.

 

Select the Records from option. Then in the Record Content dropdown menu, click Edit next to Custom selection.

 

Select the ISSN option and click Save selections. Then export the file.

 

Open the Excel file and scroll far over to the right to find the columns for ISSN and eISSN. You can deduplicate them in Excel if you wish, but if you have less than 600 ISSNs, all of them can be pasted into Journal Citation Reports, which will remove the duplicates for you.

 

Build a report in JCR

Now that you have a list of ISSNs, you can build a report in Journal Citation Reports for up to 600 journals at a time and export them to Excel.

1. Access Journal Citation Reports.
2. Click on the Journals icon below the search box.

 

Sign into your Clarivate account so you’ll be able to export results. If you don’t have one yet, it’s free to register. After you’re signed in, click on the Filter menu on the left.

 

Select the second option for ISSN/eISSN and copy and paste your ISSNs. Duplicates will be removed. Click Apply.

NOTE: Not all journals, even in Web of Science, have JIFs. You might get a message that says that some of your journals could not be found.

 

The page will refresh to show only the journals from your list. The most recent JIF year should display, but if you need to remove or add other journal metrics (such as 5 Year JIF), click Customize above the table to select what you’d like displayed. Then click Export in the upper-right corner to save the report to your computer.