Illustration:: https://bit.ly/3zfSwyf

Written by Lene Hald

You may be familiar with ‘JIF’, the Journal Impact Factor used in Web of Science and created by Clarivate. This metric is often used to compare the quality of journals and is based on the average number of citations received by articles in a journal in a 2-year window (find out more about JIF right here).

JIF is not field-normalized, which means that different citation patterns in different scientific fields are not taken into account. This makes it less than optimal if you want to compare JIFs across scientific disciplines. Enter Journal Citation Indicator, the latest toolbox addition from Clarivate.

Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) is a field-normalized metric that can help you measure the citation impact of journals across disciplines and as such supplements JIF. The metric is based on the average number of citations that articles from a journal receive in a 3-year window, which are in turn field-normalized (check out Clarivate´s discussion paper “Introducing the Journal Citation Indicator” to find out more about the computation of JCI).

Careful judgement required
In the blog post Journal Citation Indicator. Just Another Tool in Clarivate’s Metrics Toolbox? on The Scholarly Kitchen, JCI is criticized for the way it aims to achieve field-normalization, because it risks distorting the impression of how multi-field journals perform in the process.

 As is the case with all bibliometric indicators, you should use JCI with caution, and as Clarivate puts it themselves: “The normalization steps make it more reasonable to compare journals across disciplines, but careful judgement is still required” (Introducing the Journal Citation Indicator, p. 5).
 

Find a journal JCI
To find the JCI for a journal, simply access the Journal Citation Reports and enter the journal name.

If you have any questions about the Journal Citation Indicator or about bibliometric in general, please contact the CBS Library bibliometric team at: metrics.lib@cbs.dk