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Research Guides

Eastern Washington University Libraries

English 520: Seminar in Research Methods & Design

For Dr. Paul Lindholdt, Fall 2022

Find Information About a Particular Journal

How Important is Journal X?

Issues to consider:

Who is publishing the journal and how long has it been around?

Most journals are published by university presses or scholarly organizations, though some are edited by the scholarly organizations but published by for-profit publishers. You can find out how long a journal has been published on the journals website or using Ulrich's, but the volume number is usually the equivalent of the number of years (unless it's published more frequently than quarterly).

Impact Factor

Scientific and most social science journals care about their "impact factor" or a percentage of their articles that are cited by others. So you may find an "impact factor" number advertised on the journals homepage. The bigger the number, the bigger the impact.

The database Scopus has their own ranking called Citescore. Again, the bigger the number, the higher the ranking.