University Science Indicators

University Science Indicators, compares and ranks universities in various ways, including by field/subject discipline, through bibliometric analysis. Factors include total number of publications, impact factors of publications, and comparing publications among organizations.

This tool has been replaced by Essential Science Indicators

The older data within USI is available for viewing on workstation #13 at the Kline Science Library.


WHAT IS A CITATION INDEX?
A citation index is a compilation of all the cited references from journal articles indexed in a database. In a citation index, you can look up a published paper in order to find journal articles that have cited it. ISI, the producers of Science Citation Index (Web of Science), has produced an introduction to cited reference searching at http://www.isinet.com/training/jobaids/citrefpr/prim1.html.

Citation Impact and Impact Factors

WHAT IS CITATION IMPACT?
Citation Impact is the number of times a paper has been cited. ISI indexes articles in a core set of journals, so citations from publications like conference proceedings and books may not be represented in the citation count for a particular paper.
WHAT ARE IMPACT FACTORS?
ISI uses the cited references it collects to compile citation frequency data, or impact factors. An impact factor is the relationship between a discrete unit (such as a journal or a university) and the average of a broader group (such as similar journals covering a subject discipline). Impact relative to field is the citation impact for a journal or university in a particular field divided by citation impact for the field as a whole, worldwide. For example, if papers published at Yale in the field of electrical engineering have a relative impact of 1.83, the papers have been cited 83% more than electrical engineering papers produced at the average university.

ISI also produces Journal Citation Reports (JCR), which compares and ranks journals with similar journals covering a subject discipline. JCR provides production and impact data for hundreds of scientific journals. Users can compare the impact factor of a journal in relation to other titles, and track citation patterns (to and from) specific journals (e.g., find the relative importance of Cell vs. Nature).

JCR is available at Kline Science Library.


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