There are a variety of citation management tools available to support students and scholars in collecting, organizing and citing literature. UT Librarians often recommend Zotero to students because it is free and portable, but there are other tools.
​Citation Management Software Comparison Charts
EndNote (Basic is free from Web of Science/Clarivate)
EndNote comes in different versions: EndNote (license desktop), EndNote Basic and EndNote Online, click here to learn more.
Mendeley (free from Elsevier)
Zotero (free Open source)
Journal metrics such as Journal Citation Reports, Google Journal Metrics or Acceptance Rates can help you determine how a journal stacks up against other journals in the field and may help you determine not only where to submit your manuscript, but how heavily you should weigh certain articles. Journals with a higher impact factor are thought of more highly. These numbers vary between disciplines, so only compare the impact factor of a journal with other journals in the same discipline. There are also alternative journal metrics.
Journal Citation Reports
Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is a produced by Clarivate Analytics. It can be accessed either by a direct link to the database from Library Search or from within the Web of Science interface. JCR uses multiple factors to evaluate journals such as Impact Factor, Immediacy Index, EigenFactor, Cited Half Life, and Article Influence Score. JCR is a trusted source for journal ranking but it does not cover all journals.
Google Journal Metrics
Google Scholar collects and distributes journal level metrics as a way to rank and compare journals. To access these metrics click on the link on the lines to the left of the words Google Scholar to see the page titled Metrics.
Acceptance Rates
Journal acceptance rates indicate how selective journals are about the submissions they accept. If a journal is more selective, that generally indicates that the content is of a better quality. However, these can be hard to find.
Try contacting the editor of the journal to see if s/he will share the acceptance rate.
Some societies will also publish acceptance rates for their journals on their home pages. A Google search using the name of the journal or the name of the society will usually take you to the journal home page.
Acceptance rates for some journals can be found in this library subscription database. Currently over 1200 journals, primarily in Educational Technology, Educational Curriculum and Educational Psychology are available within this database but other discipline journals may also be included.
APA provides statistics which include number of manuscripts received, accepted and percentage of rejected manuscripts annual from 2004 to 2013.
Alternative Journal Metrics
A free and searchable database, journals listed in the Eigenfactor database may be searched by ISSN, publisher, year published, journal title or by using the Journal Citation Report ISI categories.
The Eigenfactor site also includes other metrics for evaluating scholarly publications such as subscription cost effectiveness and the Eigenfactor Motion Graph which is a way to view changes within scholarly publishing from 1997 to 2008 based on journal Eigenfactor scores, article influence, journal price, self citation rate and other metrics. Not all JCR categories are available for Motion Graph.
The Harzing.com web site provides an annual Journal Quality List for a select group of social science and business journals. The Harzing web site provides the downloadable program Publish or Perish which uses Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search data to provide citation metrics.
A free source that uses data from Elsevier's Scopus database and includes journal indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus database since 1996. It does not include journal impact factors but does have a number of other indicators, including SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) and h-index, cites per document, etc. Journals may be ranked by major subject areas, more specific subject categories, SJR, h-index, etc.This web site lets you find journal rankings and country rankings related to published research output.
Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) provides the SNIP metrics for over 20,000 journals indexed in Scopus. These are the same SNIP measurements in Scopus but using this link they are free.
Patrick Leung and Monit Cheung, two professions in the Graduate College of Social Work, University of Houston have compiled data on a number of journals where social work researchers might submit articles. This list includes information from Journal Citation Report and is periodically updated.
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