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UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Citation Studies and Research Impact
OTES AND TASKS
******See this webpage: http://www.lehigh.edu/~inprv/Reappt,P&TGuidelines2006revision2May2006js.pdf
MORE GENERALLY: http://www.lehigh.edu/~inprv/reappointment.html ]
[See if this webpage has some material to add to below: http://www3.lehigh.edu/arts-sciences/resources/casfaccitations.asp ]
[need to fill out what metrics are used in social sciences and humanities]
[add something about the h-factor and any other relevant factor]
Sharon provided these links:
Acceptance rates for IACR conferences and workshops <http://www2.mat.dtu.dk/people/Lars.R.Knudsen/accrates.html>
Acceptance Rates for Periodicals <http://lfolks.sdsu.edu/faculty/readyref/RRF-Acceptance.html>
Acceptance rates major database conferences <http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/%7Eapers/rates.html>
Acceptance rates of CL/NLP Conferences!! <http://www.nlplab.cn/chenwl/conf_rate.html>
Cabells Publishing Members Page <http://www.cabells.com/Members/Default.htm>
Conference Acceptance Rate Statistics - Computational Intelligence & Related <http://www.adaptivebox.net/research/bookmark/CICON_stat.html>
Conference Rating by Christoph Steindl <http://www.ssw.uni-linz.ac.at/General/Staff/CS/Research/Conferences/Rating/>
Conference Statistics <http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/%7Ealmeroth/conf/stats/>
Fairfield University :: DiMenna-Nyselius Library :: Library Research Guide for Faculty Publishing: A Guide for Publishing, Tenure Review, and Promotion <http://www.fairfield.edu/x15695.xml>
Graphics/vision publications acceptance rates statistics <http://vrlab.epfl.ch/%7Eulicny/statistics/>
Help - Finding Acceptance Rates for Journals <http://www.csupomona.edu/%7Elibrary/help/help_acceptancerates.html>
Journal Statistics and Operations Data | APA Journals <http://www.apa.org/journals/statistics/>
Mihai Christodorescu - Acceptance Rates for Selected Computer-Security Conferences <http://www.cs.wisc.edu/%7Emihai/conference%20acceptance%20rates.html>
St. John's University -- Academics & Schools -- Libraries -- Resources -- Journal Rankings & Acceptance Rates <http://www.stjohns.edu/academics/libraries/resources/journals.sju>
Tao Xie's Software Engineering Conferences <http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/taoxie/seconferences.htm>
UNT Libraries: SciTech Library, Finding Acceptance Rates for Journals <http://www.library.unt.edu/scitech/guides/acceptrates.htm>
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Assessing Your Research Impact and Where to Publish
Scholars at all stages in their careers are greatly interested in tracking the impact of their research. Scholars just starting out must document their research impact for promotion tenure decision purposes. Already established scholars often want to see whether and how other scholars are using their work.
Various resources allow researchers to do all of these things. This webpage links to some of these resources.
determine who has cited their research. Aside from playing a role in tenure and promotion decisions, citation studies can help researchers build bibliography about their subject areas and identify other researchers working in the same field. Other resources enable researchers to measure the impact of the journals in which they publish.
2. So that they can maximize the chance that their work will be read , scholars often seek the prestige of publishing in high quality journals, however this might be measured.
The purpose of this library webpage is to indicate library and other resources that can help track and interpret your research impact plus help decide where to publish.
This webpage is just a suggestive starting point. Please contact your librarian for further guidance and help in locating relevant resources specific to your research area.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Many databases allow you to determine what other scholars have cited your work. LTS maintains a identifying these. See your librarian for help in using these databases.
The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was the pioneer in databases of this kind. Lehigh University makes available ISI's data in a variety of formats:
1. Web of Science database, which covers 1993. "Web of Science" is a misnomer, since the database's coverage ranges beyond science. Web of Science actually encompasses three databases: the Science Citation Index, the Social Sciences Citation Index, and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index.
2. CD coverage. See here for help documentation.
3. Print data. See inside covers for documentation.
Beyond WOS, many other databases also enable you to track the impact of research.
If you are seeking tenure and need to document the impact of your research, you may want to go beyond ISI. For example, a mathematician might also want to use MathSciNet to identify the number of citing papers. Consult with your department to determine how best to document your research. The Library can identify resources to help you, but responsibility for documentation is solely the responsibility of the person seeking tenure.
[Sharon mentioned: we may want to add the point that citing/cited databases can help tenure candidates identify candidates for writing letters of reference.]
[Should have a link to relevant ISI tutorial information]
1. Citation Studies
This webpage provides links to detailed information about just a few of the major databases that researchers can use to determine whether and how their research has been used by others. Data produced by Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) has traditionally been used for such counts. However, the number of resources that enable such studies has been growing. Below are links to details about using just some of them.
Contact your librarian for information about which databases are appropriate for your purposes. For persons who are submitting promotion and tenure documentation, please consult with the Provost's Office or with appropriate faculty members in your department for details about what is required.
1. ISI's Science, Social Science, and Humanities Citation Indexes
The library makes available data from these indexes in web format (1993 and later), CD (dates--), and print.
ISI was the pioneer in making available data for purposes of doing citation studies. Lehigh owns three
http://www.lehigh.edu/library/guides/Citing/webofscience.htm
2. What Journals have High Impact?
ISI has developed a widely influential "metric" for determining the impact of specific journals. This is the "impact factor". [give definition or link to a defn if avail at ISI] Researchers and possibly their funders often consider a paper published in a journal with high impact factor as more valuable than one published in lower ranked journals. Whether impact factors should be relied upon for this purpose is open to question. See "Caveat Emptor" below.
The Journal Citation Report (JCR) identifies these impact factors for a large number of science and social sciences journals.
Here are the locations in the library for the two "JCR's":
Note that you can look up the impact factors for journals within a specific subject area. Also, while impact factor receives the greatest attention, the JCR's identify other metrics as well. See the front material for further information.
Aside from citation counts and impact factors, another publishing "metric" of interest to scholars is acceptance rates for journals or conferences. Low acceptance rates can be a mark of quality or prestige, though (as with any other metric) this is subject to interpretation. See Caveat Emptor below.
Here are some ways to determine acceptance rates for journals or conferences:
Especially in the sciences, to some extent in the social sciences, and much less so in the arts and humanities, people use journal impact factors to assess the quality of journals and the research they publish. Citation counts for individual articles can also be deceptive.
Unfortunately, use of impact factors or citation counts is often almost reflexive. Like rankings of universities, they can attract the unwary with the allure of an easy, quick quantitative fix on complex realities.
Consider, however, just a few of the problems posed by use of impact factors. Many impact factors are in such a tight, low range that their use in making relative comparisons of journals is meaningless. [A few other good examples can go here]
Acceptance rates of journals may also pose problems as indicators of quality: [give examples]
As articles in the bibliography below suggest (see, e.g., The Counting House, the WSJ article, and the PLoS Medicine article), a great deal of interpretation must be brought to bear in using such metrics citation counts and impact factors. Whether they are being used for tenure decisions, for decisions as to where to publish, or what journals to read, these metrics must be used responsibly and with reservation.
Consult the bibliography below to get a flavor of the issues and problems associated with use of such metrics.
See here for examples of relevant bibliography. This is non-exhaustive and more suggestive than anything else. Ask your librarian for help in locating articles up-to-date discussions of how citation studies and metrics should or should not be used or interpreted. Furthermore, they can help you find articles similar to those below but that relate to your specific subject areas.
[We may want to add some bibliography about the role of acceptance rates. Add link recent WSJ article? ]
9/22//06