Publishing Your Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences : Journal Selection: Databases

Premier database for searching citations and who cited whom. Focus is on the sciences and social sciences. It does have some sporadic coverage of arts and humanities. Use Cited Reference search to find articles that cite a given article. Search on a broad area. Analyze results by journal.

Provides a means of determining the relative importance of scholarly and technical journals within their subject disciplines. Journals are evaluated and ranked according to their impact factor, immediacy index, and other criteria. This results in one method for identifying a subject's core journals. Two editions available: Science and Social Science. No edition for Arts and Humanities.

While focused on the language and literature publishers it does contain some broader journals as well. Look by subject or journal. Submission process included.

Comprehensive periodicals list that includes information on indexes, publishers, and circulation. Also included is information about whether journal is refereed, tables of contents of journals, and Find It to determine campus access, if available. Keyword and title searching.

Google Scholar provides citation counts for articles found within Google Scholar. Depending on the discipline and cited article, it can be find more cited references than Web of Knowledge.

Journal Citation Reports provides ranking for journals in the areas of science, technology, and social sciences. For every journal covered, the following information is collected or calculated: Citation and article counts, Impact factor, Immediacy index, Cited half-life, citing half-life, Source data listing, Citing journal listing, Cited journal listing, Subject categories, Publisher information.

To determine the impact factor for a particular journal, select a JCR edition (Science or Social Science) and year. Next, select a search option (view journals by subject, search for a specific journal, or view all journals) to find if the journal you're looking for has an impact. Because impact factors mean little on their own, it's best to select the 'view journals by subject' option to the journal you are interested in compared to the other journals in the same category. Sort your results by impact factor so you can see how the journal compares.

Eignenfactor scores can be found in the above listed Journal Citation Reports or at eigenfactor.org. Eigenfactor scores are intended to give a measure of how likely a journal is to be used, and are thought to reflect how frequently an average researcher would access content from that journal. (Wikipedia) Ranks journals using an algorithm, comparable to Google’s (Morrison). Each journal has a calculated Eigenfactor (determined by the number of articles published in a journal, with prolific journals having a high Eigenefactor; also have an article influence (AI) which is similar to the impact factor where it measures the average influence of an article .

“The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.).” Scopus contains more than 15,000 journals from over 4,000 international publishers as well as over 1000 open access journals. SCImago's "evaluation of scholarly journals is to assign weights to bibliographic citations based on the importance of the journals that issued them, so that citations issued by more important journals will be more valuable than those issued by less important ones." (SJR indicator)