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Publishing

This guide provides information on determining the impact of a journal, acceptance rates of journals, copyright rights as an author, and how to find who is citing your work.

What about Impact Factor?

UWS does not subscribe to the Web of Science Journal Impact Reports, however, Eigenfactor.org uses similar measures to determine quality and influence of a journal and it's free!

If you're thinking about publishing a paper or are just curious for an in depth evaluation of journals you can download Publish or Perish which mines Google Scholar citation information and is best for searching journals not in Web of Science.

Using Eigenfactor to determine a journal's impact

Note: Eigenfactor.org has some display issues when displayed in Internet Explorer, if possible view in Firefox, Google Chrome, or Safari


Eigenfactor.org can give you some indication of a journal's impact in your field. Keep in mind only journals that are indexed by Thompson's Journal Citation Reports are included in the calculations so it is a narrow pool of influential journals. The scores reflect each discipline's specificities and are calculated over a 5 year period so as not to be inflated by one good year.

EF = Eigenfactor score

"A journal's Eigenfactor score is our measure of the journal's total importance to the scientific community.

With all else equal, a journal's Eigenfactor score doubles when it doubles in size. Thus a very large journal such as the Journal of Biological Chemistry which publishes more than 6,000 articles annually, will have extremely high Eigenfactor scores simply based upon its size.

Eigenfactor scores are scaled so that the sum of the Eigenfactor scores of all journals listed in Thomson's Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is 100. In 2006, the journal Nature has the highest Eigenfactor score, with a score of 1.992. The top thousand journals, as ranked by Eigenfactor score, all have Eigenfactor scores above 0.01" -eigenfactor.org FAQ

AI = Article Influence score

"A journal's Article Influence score is a measure of the average influence of each of its articles over the first five years after publication.

Article Influence score measures the average influence, per article, of the papers in a journal. As such, it is comparable to Thomson Scientific's widely-used Impact Factor. Article Influence scores are normalized so that the mean article in the entire Thomson Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database has an article influence of 1.00.

In 2006, the top journal by Article Influence score is Annual Reviews of Immunology, with an article influence of 27.454. This means that the average article in that journal has twenty seven times the influence of the mean journal in the JCR." -eigenfactor.org FAQ

The above image displays Eigenfactor analysis for the 7th most influential journal in the field of library and information science. Here the EI and AI are closely aligned, which is not always the case. If a journal has a high AI but not a high EF it may mean that not every article is highly cited but there is some influential research coming from that publication.

Further Reading