Would you like to benchmark your research activity? Try Journal & Highly Cited Data

What is Journal & Highly Cited Data?  Journal & Highly Cited Data is the module name for Journal Citation Reports and Essential Science Indicators.  This is part of a larger initiative by Thomson Reuters to provide a single environment for research and bibliometric assessment & evaluation.

How do I get access to Journal & Highly Cited Data?  Thomson Reuters are running a free trial and you have access to Journal & Highly Cited Data from 1^st May to 30^th September 2014 via Aston University IP range only. 

1. Go to the Library homepage and choose Library SmartSearch
2. Choose "Databases" on the grey toolbar
3. Choose "W" and click on "Web of Science"
4. You can access Journal Citation Reports and Essential Science Indicators from the black toolbar at the top of the screen

Also, Journal & Highly Cited Data will link to Web of Science, so you can move from from search into analytics without having to re-enter search details.

How will this benefit me?  Journal & Highly Cited Data is a single resource to help institutions make the most informed decisions to support programmes and policies. You’ll be able to easily compare individuals, institutions, and publications, plus pinpoint emerging trends and influential researchers, using this new platform.

What are the key changes?  A re-designed and unified platform for assessing and evaluating research performance that includes:

·        Improved data clarity with indicators based on publication year

·        New trend data views and visualisations

·        Easily save and export reports

·        Drill down to access  underlying data that informs Journal Citation Reports metrics

·        Easily analyse and compare journal trends over time

·        New exploratory environment promoting discovery and easier analysis

·        Personalisation options to support your workflow

Aston University Library welcome your feedback as the module will be on a subscription basis from the 1st October 2014.  Please send your comments to library@aston.ac.uk and use the Subject: Journal & Highly Cited Data feedback

Article-level citation data: why and how?

At a conference I attended a few weeks ago, Anna Dickinson from the REF team at HEFCE gave an overview of the REF for a group of librarians supporting research.  One of the key points she made was that none of the sub-panels assessing submissions for REF will be using journal title-level citation data (e.g. Impact Factors or similar) to assess submitted research outputs, but that 11 of the 36 sub-panels will be provided with information about article-level citation data, including contextual data for that subject area.

So, a journal article submitted to one of the 11 sub-panels will be supplied to the members of that sub-panel with details of how many times that particular journal article has been cited in the literature, and the number of citations that a "top" journal article in that subject area might expect to receive.

If you want to find out what the article-level citation data for a specific journal article is, then you will need to use Scopus, the citation data provider for REF.  Search for the article of interest in Scopus, and you will see the "Cited by" information in a box on the right hand side of the page.

For more information about the use of citation data in the REF, including information about which panels are using this data and how the contextual citation data will be calculated (not yet available at the time of writing), see the REF 2014 web page.