Skip to Main Content

How Do I For Admin Professionals

This guide offers tips for using HHSL resources and services, including finding items and information, understanding citations to articles or books, and using tools and databases.

Journal Data

In addition to the contents of a journal, there is a great deal of information about the journals themselves that is useful for administrative tasks. This information can include:

  • Whether or not a journal is peer-reviewed.
    • Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people of similar competence to the producers of the work (peers). It constitutes a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards of quality, improve performance, and provide credibility. In academia peer review is often used to determine an academic paper's suitability for publication.
      • Information on whether or not a journal is peer-reviewed can be found using Ulrichsweb:

    • On Ulrichsweb you can also get information about the journal itself, such as the publisher, link to the journal website to retrieve instructions for authors etc.
  • Where a particular journal is indexed.
    • Journals can be indexed in a number of sources. For example, PubMed is an index to journals in medicine, while CINAHL is an index to journals in nursing. Indexing can have significant overlap. Smaller, specialized journals may only be indexed in discipline-specific databases.

  • What is the impact factor (IF) of a specific journal? [wikipedia entry on IF] 
    • In any given year, the impact factor of a journal is the average number of citations received per paper published in that journal during the two preceding years. For example, if a journal has an impact factor of 3 in 2008, then its papers published in 2006 and 2007 received 3 citations each on average in 2008.
    • IF is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field. Journals with higher impact factors are deemed to be more important than those with lower ones.
    • Not all journals have an impact factor.
    • There are also other measures of journal influence (bibliometric indicators), such as EigenFactor, Immediacy Index, and Cited Half Life; IF is one of the more well-known indicators. Consult with a librarian to get more information if needed, and see also the Bibliometrics Tab above.