Journal Evaluation

Impact Factor  The impact factor, often abbreviated IF, is a measure of the citations to science and social science journals. citationsscience and social science journals  It is frequently used as a factor for the importance of a journal to its field.  The Impact factor was devised by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information, now part of Thomson, a large worldwide US-based publisher.Eugene GarfieldInstitute for Scientific InformationThomson  Impact factors are calculated each year by Thomson Scientific for those journals which it indexes, and the factors and indices are published in Journal Citation Reports.Journal Citation Reports  The publication of each year covered occurs in the summer of the following year. For example impact factors for 2008 will be published in the summer of 2009.

Other Factors  Some related values, also calculated and published by the same organization, are: the immediacy index: the number of citations the articles in a journal receive in a given year divided by the number of articles published.immediacy index the cited half-life: the median age of the articles that were cited in Journal Citation Reports each year. For example, if a journal's half-life in 2005 is 5, that means the citations from are half of all the citations from that journal in 2005, and the other half of the citations precede the aggregate impact factor for a subject category: it is calculated taking into account the number of citations to all journals in the subject category and the number of articles from all the journals in the subject category.

Calculation  The impact factor of a journal is calculated based on a two- year period.  It can be viewed as the average number of citations in a year given to those papers in a journal that were published during the two preceding years.  For example, the 2003 impact factor of a journal would be calculated as follows: A = the number of times articles published in were cited in indexed journals during 2003 B = the number of "citable items" (usually articles, reviews, proceedings or notes; not editorials and letters-to-the-Editor) published in impact factor = A/B  (note that the 2003 impact factor was actually published in 2004, because it could not be calculated until all of the 2003 publications had been received.)

How to find IF 

ISI Journal Selection  The evaluation process consists of evaluation of many criteria such as Basic Journal Publishing Standards including Timeliness of publication, adherence to International Editorial Conventions, English Language Bibliographic Information (including English article titles, keywords, author abstracts, and cited references).

How to find ISI Papers  gi-bin/jrnlst/jloptions.cgi?PC=K gi-bin/jrnlst/jloptions.cgi?PC=K

Examples  COMPUTING AND INFORMATICS Bimonthly ISSN: SLOVAK ACAD SCIENCES INST INFORMATICS, DUBRAVSKA CESTA 9, BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIA, impact factor: 0.34  international journal of computer science and network security is not ISI and is not acceptable in aut  APPLIED MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTATION Biweekly ISSN: ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC, 360 PARK AVE SOUTH, NEW YORK, USA, NY, impact factor: 0,821