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SAL Ed.D.Program (Dunn): Journal Rankings

Journal Rankings

With millions of journals to choose from, how do you know where to submit your work? Here are two databases that may help you decide:

Journal Citation Reports--Multidisciplinary database that ranks most major academic journals by how often they have been cited. JCR keeps track of the value of journals in terms of quality. Every title listed in JCR is scholarly. You can search by category if you want more of an overview:

 

Search by topic/subject yielded these results for "education"

Search by topic/subject yielded these results for "education"

Searching for Adult Education Quarterly brings this result:

What Is An Impact Factor?

Our friends at Wikipedia offer this definition of the Journal Impact Factor:

The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index that reflects the yearly average number of citations that articles published in the last two years in a given journal received. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field; journals with higher impact factors are often deemed to be more important than those with lower ones.

The examples below are from the Journal Citation Report.

 

 

 

Journal Impact Factor

Impact factor results are often presented this way:

Metric Trends

Another way to display the impact factor over time:

Another Option

Another Option

Not everything you are interested in will be found in the Journal Citation Reports. JCR is part of the Web of Science, and that was originally developed for the "hard sciences", such as organic chemistry. Web of Science still trends that way, but has started adding more journals from the social sciences. So, it's possible that you might be looking for journal which will not be found in the JCR. Where to go?

Another option is Ulrich's Periodicals Directory. You might be looking for  the Journal of Scholarly Publishing.

 

Your results might look like this:

This icon indicates that it is Referreed. Get it? A referee's jersey? ( A little library world humor.) Clicking on the title will tell you where it's published and under "indexing & abstracting" you can find the databases that carry this title. There is also an advanced search option if you need to be more specific in your searching.