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Resources for Faculty

ORCID iD

What is an ORCID iD?

ORCID, which stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a free, unique, persistent identifier for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. It allows all your research information to be accessible via your own unique profile, to be used wherever you need it.

Anyone who participates in research, scholarship, or innovation can register for an ORCID iD for themselves free of charge, and you can use the same iD throughout your whole career‚ even if your name changes or you move to a different organization, discipline, or country.

Register for and learn more about ORDID iD.

Manuscript Matchers

Web of Science Manuscript Match

Elsevier JournalFinder

Taylor & Francis Journal Suggester

What is a Manuscript Matcher?
A manuscript matcher helps you find the most related journals for your manuscript. Input the title and/or abstract of your article and the manuscript matcher will provide a list of the top matched journals for your article based on keyword matching. Two popular options are Web of Science Manuscript Matcher and Elsevier JournalFinder. Both are available to use for free.

Why use one (or more)?
Manuscript matchers can be helpful tools for locating publications in your field. Both Web of Science and Elsevier’s matching services provide a friendly interface for browsing each journal’s credentials and metrics. They provide only credible publications and can help you steer clear of predatory publishing. Taylor & Francis also offers a Journal Suggester.

Web of Science is an information platform that provides access to multiple databases and therefore many publishers. Its content and suggestions may be more broad than Elsevier and Taylor & Francis, which are both publishers themselves. You may find that a search in each yields different results with some overlap, which may help you narrow down your search.

How do they work?
For more information on how to use these tools, view the tutorials below.

Journal Metrics

What are journal metrics?

Journal metrics are bibliometric indicators that measure the impact of scholarly journals. Surveying a journal’s metrics, such as Journal Impact Factor and CiteScore, can give you a sense of how widely cited a journal’s work is, and therefore how significant to the field it is. There are two main citation indexing databases whose journal metrics are considered the gold standard: Web of Science and SCOPUS. They each have unique metrics; there are several other metrics providers with their own indicators as well.


How do you use them?

Metrics can also be used to evaluate and compare journals for potential publication. You can compare journal metrics to determine the impact of a publication within its field. Researchers may wish to include metrics in their CVs, tenure and promotion materials, and grant applications to demonstrate impact of their personal research contributions.

Most journal metrics do not translate between disciplines, so always be sure to compare metrics between like journals. Additionally, while these metrics are all quantitative, it is important to consider other qualitative evaluation measure, such as a journal’s peer-review process, editorial board, publisher, and reputation. Often, journal comparison tools will also show you factors such as publication costs, time, and acceptance rating.

Web of Science is an information platform that provides access to multiple databases. Its parent company, Clarivate, also publishes the Journal Citation Report (JCR), which compiles data on individual journals including basic bibliographic data and proprietary bibliometric data. You can use Web of Science to obtain up-to-date journal metrics or JCR to obtain yearly published metrics. All metrics based on Web of Science-indexed journals can be access via Journal Citation Reports.

Impact Factor - Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the best known indicator of journal impact. It is defined as "the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year."

Immediacy Index - Immediacy Index is the average number of times an article is cited in the year it is published. It indicates how quickly articles in a journal are cited and is calculated by dividing the number of citations to articles published in a given year by the number of articles published in that year.

Cited/citing half-life - Half-life indices show how quickly journals age (cited half-life) and how current their content is (citing half-life).

Eigenfactor - uses information from the entire citation network to measure the importance of each journal, much as Google's PageRank algorithm measures the importance of websites on the world wide web. Eigenfactor measures can be accessed on the Eigenfactor website.

View this video from Web of Science to learn a little more about how Impact Factor and Citation Indicator work.

SCOPUS is an abstract and citation database updated daily. This large multidisciplinary database specializes in the life sciences, social sciences, physical sciences and health sciences. It provides tools for tracking citations, creating researcher profiles, and visualizing search results. SCOPUS-based metrics can be accessed via SCOPUS platform as well as via CWTS Journal Indicators and Scimago (SJR indicator only) websites. Many publishers will also provide information about impact of their journals on the journal web pages.

Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) - measures contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field. As a field-normalized metric SNIP offers the ability to benchmark and compare journals from different subject areas. This is especially helpful to researchers publishing in multidisciplinary fields.

SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) - a prestige metric based on the idea that 'all citations are not created equal'. With SJR, the subject field, quality and reputation of the journal have a direct effect on the value of a citation. It is a size-independent indicator and it ranks journals by their 'average prestige per article' and can be used for journal comparisons in the scientific evaluation process.

CiteScore - CiteScore is Elsevier's answer to JIF. CiteScore for a journal in a given year counts the citations received in that year to documents published in three proceeding years and divides this by the number of documents published in that journal in the same 3-year period.

Web of Science JCR and SCOPUS use proprietary metrics and are subscription-based. You can find much of the same information across several free databases.

Cabell’s - Cabell's Scholarly Analytics helps you to determine which journals typically publish manuscripts similar to yours or could be the best fit for your manuscript. The index in each Directory helps you match the characteristics of your manuscript to the topic areas the journal emphasizes, as well as bibliometrics, journal ranking and acceptance rate.

CWTS - It provides ranking for some 20,000 journals indexed in SCOPUS, including SNIP, IPP, number of publications in a year and a percentage of journal self-citations.

Eigenfactor - The Eigenfactor.org website provided a searchable database of Eigenfactor scores and Article Influence scores for the numerous journals covered in Thomson-Reuters Journal Citation Reports.

Google Scholar - another source of journal-level metrics. Based on Google Scholar citations it ranks journals grouped by subject categories or language. The metrics used are: h5-index defined as the h-index for articles published in the last 5 complete years. It is the largest number h such that h articles published in 2010-2014 have at least h citations each, and h5-median for a journal is the median number of citations for the articles that make up its h5-index

Scimago - The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a publicly available portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus database.