Is this paper published in an SCI Journal?

Today, I am doing a review from these three papers, and while reading, I decided to write about the Science Citation Index

For Taiwanese universities, publishing scientific papers is highly important. And, even, more important if the publication happens to be in a SCI or SSCI journal. So, as a graduate student it is easy to find yourself in a conversation about the kind of journal you are publishing on. Therefore, in this blog, I'll explain how to check if the journal you have published, or targeting to publish (or the paper you are reading) is indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information.

The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) is run by Thomson Reuter (http://science.thomsonreuters.com/). The ISI indexes and maintains a citation database covering thousands of academic journals. Also, provides indexing service including the Science Citation Index (SCI) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). The database allows researchers to identify how often articles have been cited, and who had cited them.

In addition, the ISI publishes an Annual Journal Citation Report listing the Impact Factor (http://admin-apps.isiknowledge.com/JCR/help/h_impfact.htm#impact_factor) for each journal. The Journal Impact Factor is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the Journal Citation Report (JCR) year.

The Impact Factor is calculated by dividing the number of citations in the JCR year by the total number of articles published in the two previous years. An Impact Factor of 1.0 means that, on average, the articles published one or two year ago have been cited one time. An Impact Factor of 2.5 means that, on average, the articles published one or two years ago have been cited two and a half times. Citing articles may be from the same journal; most citing articles are from different journals.

So, How do you know if the journal you are targeting is and SCI or SSCI journal? Well, there are two easy ways: (1) Google for the journal on the Web, and (2) Use the ISI Web page (http://admin.isiknowledge.com/SessionError.cgi?&DestApp=JCR&Error=No+SID+Received).

For instance, the paper that appeared in the above picture with the title "Greenhouse gas footprint of different biofuel production system" was published in the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews journal. Then, when I searched for that journal on Internet, its Web page looks like this:

The Web page shows that the Impact Factor (IF) of this journal is 4.842. Also, the IF appears in the middle of the main Web page (kind of marketing tool). Nevertheless, within the scientific community, the journals' IF plays a large but sometimes controversial role in determining the quality of a scientific article. For your reference, the journals with the highest IF that I am aware of are the following: Nature (34.48), Cell (31.152), and Science (29.747).

The second fastest and easiest way to obtain the impact factor (if you don't find the journal's Web page) is using the ISI Web. The link is this http://admin.isiknowledge.com/SessionError.cgi?&DestApp=JCR&Error=No+SID+Received.

As an illustration, I will show how to find the same journal's IF (Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews) using the ISI's Web page.

Step 1. 
Access http://admin.isiknowledge.com/SessionError.cgi?&DestApp=JCR&Error=No+SID+Received and establish a new session. Click "establishing a new session."

Step 2.
Select "Search for a specific journal" then click "Submit"

Step 3. 
Type the name of the journal in the space below "Enter words from journal title of ISSN" and click "SEARCH"

Step 4.
The journal's citation metrics appear.

The impact factor is in the sixth column. It is the same value we saw in the journal's Web page: 4.842. If you would like to know more about the meaning of each number in the table, click the (i) icon that appears after "JCR Data" or "Eigenfactor Metrics."

The ISI Web page also can be used to identify journals. If you want to increase the pool of journals where you may target for publication, search around on the ISI Web site.