Wednesday, October 3, 2012

journal citation reports and plant perennials for soils

So this is something quite useful I just learned that Tim Pagella, a lecturer here at Bangor, introduced us to.

It's the Journal Citation Reports, that basically inform you how well a journal perfoms and allows for an objective evaluation. So you get an idea if the article you are interested in is published in a journal with a strong impact, and in a general way rates the (potential) quality of the article you are about to read. The reports have other uses, looking intro trends in journals, subjects of rising interest, etc. Go and take a look...

Just head for the Web of Knowledge database search engine from your univerity portal, click on the Additional Resources tab and then into the Journal Citation Reports. Look for a specific journal or a group by subject category, e.g. Forestry, then check out its stats like impact factor or total cites among other. Obviously, more prestigious and broader themed journals like Science have a higher score than those more specialized like Agroforestry Systems. It's just a tool, but a pretty useful one: You might think twice before basing your arguments on a reference from a journal that is not much read or cited by peers.

And by the way, you definitely want to look into a recent comment in Nature (which has a very high impact factor in the Journal Citation Reports) that argues for integrating trees with food crops to restore soils and increase staple yield in Africa, a.k.a. Agroforestry !


No comments:

Post a Comment