Impact Factors, Journal Citation Reports

Posted on July 27th, 2009 in Citations, Journals by Melody Royster

Impact factors are used by faculty to decide where to publish, by tenure and promotion committees to decide if faculty have published in important journals, and by librarians to decide which journals must be kept and which may be cut during hard times. The impact factor of a journal is supposed to tell us how often articles in it are cited, which is supposed to indicate how intensely and widely read the journal is. (The impact factor is calculated by looking at the number of articles cited this year/the number of “citeable items” that were published in the previous 2 years.)

However, librarians have discussed problems with the impact factor during the past several years. Depending on the field of study, citation patterns aren’t well captured by impact factors and journals with review articles are much more highly rated than journals that only include research articles.

A good article is at Wired: http://www.wired.com/culture/geekipedia/magazine/17-06/mf_impactfactor

Other articles:

(2009). Is Impact Factor True Evaluation for Ranking Quality Measure?. DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology, 29(3), 55-8. Retrieved 27 July 2009, from Library Lit & Inf Full Text database.

More articles from Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts

APA Style Citations from PsycINFO

Posted on March 4th, 2009 in APA, Citations, Databases by Melody Royster

A student asked me recently if there is a way to get APA Style citations for articles indexed in PsycINFO. She knew she could export the article information to RefWorks and then print out a bibliography, but she wanted the citation directly from PsycINFO.

Many databases will give you citations to their articles; some give you options for several different styles. Most are pretty straightforward about how to do this. But often the links are hidden.

In PsycINFO, you should either  click on the box next to the one or several articles you’re interested in or open the record for the article. Then, click on the SAVE link above the list of articles. When the Save page opens, change the drop down menu to “Citation in APA Style.” Save the  citations to a text or HTML file and you have your citations!

In databases on the CSA Illumna platform (Linguistics and Language Behavior, Sociological Abstracts, ERIC, PAIS International, and Criminal Justice Abstracts), you can set up a bibliography in several different citation styles.

Just click on the articles of interest to you. Click on “Save, Print, Email” above the results list. On the next page, choose whether you’d like a bibliography of only your marked records (those you’ve clicked on) or all of those that were found.

Skip the comments box, choose whether you’d like the bibliography in HTML, Text, RTF, or MS Word formats. Then choose one of several citation styles: APA, the American Medical Association, Chicago, Harvard, MLA, or Turabian. Click on Create and you’ve got a bibliography of the articles you’ve just found.

They suggest you “check your references for accuracy.” I must agree. I ran a practice bibliography in APA Style and noticed that 2 of the 4 citations didn’t include volume numbers, required for APA Style. They also didn’t include the DOI which APA now requires. And it includes the sentence “Retrieved from www.csa.com.” APA no longer requires or suggests this. It looks like the citation format is based on an older version of APA.