Citation impact of journals

This section of the report is focused on the journals in which the school/department/division most frequently published in 2015–2019. It gives details of the citation impact of its papers published in those journals.

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Journal-level metrics are very different from article-level metrics, and it is important to take this into account in any use of them.

If you want to assess the citation impact of specific publications, or of a specific researcher’s body of publications, article-level metrics are much more appropriate.

It may seem obvious that using journal-level metrics as a proxy for article-level metrics is inappropriate.

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In the context of the Research Metrics Reports, journal metrics can be used to help a school/department/division assess the success of its publication strategy, and/or to be one source of information which helps to guide future publication strategy.

For example, if there is a journal in which a school/department/division publishes frequently and yet its papers published in that journal have low citation impact, one might want to examine that journal in more detail in order to understand why this is happening.

Some caveats should be entered here. Firstly, achieving citation impact is not the sole aim of publishing research. There are some journals which are designed to publish research which is unquestionably valuable but which, by its nature, is unlikely to achieve high impact within academia as measured by citations.

A second caveat about journal metrics is that this application of them is based on the assumption (at least in part) that the identity of the journal is a major determining factor in the citation impact achieved by papers.

The conclusion must therefore be two-sided.

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This final part of the guide is designed primarily for members of the University of Manchester who have access to the report and who want to know how it has been put together.

We used SciVal to identify the papers published by the school/department/division over the period 2015–2019.

On the basis of these details, we identified the c.25 journals in which it published most papers.

We then looked at the citation impact of the school/department/division’s papers in each journal in terms of the proportions of these which were among the top 1%, 5%, 10% and 25% most cited in their field.

The report presents this data as a horizontal stacked bar chart, with the bars divided into segments for Top 1%, Top 2–5%, Top 6–10%, Top 11–25%, and Outside Top 25%.

Having looked at the citation impact of the school/department/division’s papers in a certain journal, you may then want to compare it with the citation impact of all papers in the same journal. You can find out this information from SciVal as follows.

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