1. Education Research: Journal Rankings and
Citation Reports
• Your impact author impact,
o Google Scholar
citation impact
o Publish or Perish
o Web of Science
• Where to publish
o “Best” journals journal impact
o How to find them
• Along the way
o Discussion: How to raise profile of Education
journals/research? Or does it matter?

2. Assessing author/article impact
• Why?
o Promotion/tenure
• How much have I published? Have my articles, etc.
been cited? By whom? How often?
o Trace your (or someone else’s) research over
time
o Find out the big names/big ideas
• How?
o Tools like Google Scholar, Publish or Perish, Web
of Science, etc.

3. Google Scholar
• Freely available; easy to use
• Generally better coverage of social
sciences
• Gives the big picture; the general idea
• More current
• Gives equal rank to everything 
• Inflated citation counts?  or 
• What’s missing?

6. Get citations
for non-journal
materials
(books, videos)

7. Harzing’s Publish or Perish
• Uses Google Scholar data
• Software download
(http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm#download)
• H-index
o a scholar with an index of h has published h papers
with at least h citations each (Jorge E. Hirsch)
o reflects both the number of publications and the
number of citations per publication rather than
simply total number of citations

8. Publish or Perish

9. H-index: 13
M. Wesch has published 13 papers each
of which has been cited in other papers
at least 13 times.

10. Publish or Perish
• Provides a way to manipulate Google
Scholar data

11. Web of Science
• Impact of article/citation
o Number of times cited

12. Web of Science
• Cited Reference Searching
o to find articles whose authors cited your
publications
o only includes citations from its core list of
journals

14. All the articles that cited Nodding’s
2005 article in Educational Leadership:

15. Citation report

16. Use WoS to see all
citations to one author

17. Keeping track…
• Create citation alerts

19. Journal Impact
• Why?
o Where should I publish?
o What does it mean that my colleague/student/
new hire published in journal X?
o How do I find out more about journal quality?
• How?
o Journal Citation Reports(WoS)
o H-index and other article-level tools
o Cabell’s Publishing Directories

20. Journal Citation Reports
• Standard source for journal rankings
• Impact factor
o average number of citations received per paper
published in that journal during the two preceding
years
• Education is not well-represented
• WoS: “…covering less than ten percent of the
journals in education” (Corby, 2008)

21. JCR

23. Does this reflect your view of
“the best” journals?
• Problems with JCR/Impact factor
o Only indexes highest quality, most influential
journals
o Has roots in sciences (Corby, 2001)
o Pure/hard subjects have higher impact factors
than soft/applied (Goodyear et al., 2009)
o Education is interdisciplinary by nature;
education publishing more diverse (Goodyear et
al., 2009)

24. Goodyear et al., 2009
• Identified 11 primary journals

25. Where else?
• Journal impact:
o Eigenfactor
o SCImago Journal and Country Rank
o Google Scholar: Metrics
• Info about journals:
o Directory of Open Access Journals
o Ulrichsweb

26. SCImago
Journal and
Country
Rank

27. Google Scholar Metrics

28. Where to publish?
• Journal impact just one way to assess journal
• Other considerations:
o Peer-review? (Ulrichsweb)
o Publisher/editorial board (well-known?)
o Acceptance rates (Cabell’s)
o Scope/ good fit
o High-visibility: Where is it indexed?
(Klingner, 2005)
o Open access?

29. Ulrich’s
• Peer-review, info about journal…

30. Cabell’s
• Acceptance rates, type of review, etc.

31. Publisher/journal websites
• Submission guidelines, contact info, etc.

32. Search in
article
database

33. Summary
• Many tools available
• Relying on just one: inaccurate picture?
• Use several tools/strategies to tell more
accurate story about a researcher/author
• Use several tools/strategies to select
journal for publication
• Ask your Librarian for help

34. For more info and help…
• Graduate Education Research Guide
o http://researchguides.library.brocku.ca/EDUCGraduate
• Jennifer Thiessen
o jthiessen@brocku.ca
o Ext. 3573
• Open Access Week Oct. 22-26
o Sessions from 12-1 every day (more details on library
website)