Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2022 for Annual Updated Metrics in the Web of Science
The 2022 annual Journal Citation Report was recently released by Clarivate two months ago, in June. Every year, scholars from different industries such as communication, academic research, normal readers, Core Collective Journals, Web of Science and arts and science anxiously anticipate this report, which has also been the case this year.
What is JCR?
JCR is a product of Clavirate and is an influential resource for creating factor data. This data provides impact factors and ranking of journals in the lives of social and science based on the infinite citation. It offers sorting options such as total articles, immediacy index and total sites. Moreover, JCR also proves the 5-year impact factor and visualized trend data.
When Does JCR Release?
The Journal Citation Report is a significant release that comes out annually and covers all the top-most academic journals and the scientometric information provided for all the communication industry scholars. This report is anticipated explicitly for its information on journal impact factors. The Journal Citation Report’s metrics are highly authenticated and reliable for journal evaluation since the information extracted from this journal is extremely organic and neutral.
Who is Most Benefitted by JCR?
Every year, research organizations, libraries, and researchers rely on Journal Citation Report heavily to gauge the quality and standard of journals. At the same time, the rankings are used by the publishers for promotion in their academic circle or community.
The Recent JCR Release
Clavirate, its original publisher, recently released the 2022 update of this Journal Citation Report. The recent JCR update for 2022 is based on the Web of Science Core Collection research and information from the year 2021 – which is an amalgamation of all the conference proceedings, books, and journals from the database of the world’s most significant publisher-neutral citation.
At the Clarivate publishing house, the Journal Citation Report is updated annually with the help of the publishing organization’s global and in-house team of editors. Out of the cherry-picked content from global publications and research, it is then further sorted for the most accurate and authentic data to ensure accuracy in the JCR metrics. Then the insights revealed in annual JCR updates are used by publishers, researchers, libraries, and publishing organizations around the globe to promote their journals as valuable assets in the communication industry or convey the driving value of journals to the audiences.
The Difference in JCR 2022 Release
According to the JCR 2022 annual update, the coronavirus pandemic continues to influence many scholarly publishing aspects, as it keeps influencing aspects of global societies.
The Vice President and Editor-in-Chief of Web of Science editorial at Clarivate, Nandita Quaderni, has stated, “the Journal Citation Reports are updated with authentic, carefully selected and curated data; we can clearly see and gauge how the academic community has rapidly responded to the covid-10 pandemic crisis, that has hit the publishing and academic industry as much as it has influenced any other industry or aspect of the world or our societies. The researchers who work on Journal Citation Report updates every year have carefully studied, acknowledged, and analyzed the origins of the virus, the resources of its spreading across the world, and what has been the ramifications of the virus in our world and academic industry. The information and insights included in the annual JCR updates also include the work researchers have indulged in exploring vaccines and therapies for the covid-19 pandemic”.
She further added, “The influence and effect of the COVID-19 pandemic are nowhere near an end because it will be continuously seen for decades in the literature and citation industry. Especially if we compare the recent development index with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 3 on Health and Wellbeing, we will see a clearer picture of the calamities in recent times. Our professionally extracted and curated data is particularly useful to support different research communities working under the umbrella of UN SGDs, and we are ever so proud of it. The information and insight provided in our annual Journal Citation Report updates help the UN SGD researchers make informed decisions and gauge the innovation pace”.
Key Indicators and Features Out of the 2022 Annual Journal Citation Report
Here, we have picked the key indicators and features out of the 2022 annual Journal Citation Report for you:
- What’s Covered in the Journal? In the Journal Citation Report’s annual updates, all the journals included in the Web of Science Core Collection are rated for value and authenticity. Until last year’s JCR update, released in June of 2021, the journals covered were only limited to the natural and social sciences field, but this year’s JCR update also includes humanities and art journals.
Precisely, this year’s report includes 12,828 journals from the science industry, 6,691 journals from the social science industry, and 3,092 journals from the humanities and arts industries, respectively.
- What does the Journal Citation cover? The citations in the Journal Citation Report of the year 2022 mostly include citations from the Web of Science Collection from the year 2021. The total citations account for 2.7 million citable data extracted from the 2021 Web of Science Collection. The latest JCR update includes 145 million cited references from the same Web of Science Core Collection.
- What is the JIF Calculation of 2022 JCR? The 2022 JCR included all the information and citations from 2021 of the Web of Science Core Collection, and according to the 2021 data, the JIF calculations for a single journal amounts up to the sum divided into the following:
- Numerator: The total citation amount of the journal received from the 2019 and 2020 published articles.
- Denominator: The journal’s total citable items were published in 2019 and 2020.
- First-time entrants: a total of 190 journals were added for the first time in the 2022 JCR update and procured their first-ever JIFs.
- Additional Metrics: Other metrics have also been provided in the 2022 JCR update than JIF, which have the ability to be used as alternative or supplementary ways for journal evaluation. Two of the other metrics included in the Journal Citation Report are:
- Indicator of the journal Citation: The journal Citation Indicator is a metric recently added to the JCR updates about a year ago. It analyzes and accounts for all the discipline’s citation and publication frequencies. Essentially, it is just a JIF normalized by discipline that ensures an added effective way of assessing the quality of a journal across more fields than the original JIF metrics do.
- Immediacy Index: This is another metric included in the recent JCR update of 2022 that divides the number of annual citations received from the journals by the total amount of articles published annually. This metric is particularly useful and flexible for gauging the performance indicators of newly added journals in the JCR, which the JIFs have not yet received.
- Early Accessed Inclusion Content: At times, even before an article is published for the audience, the JCR update usually includes it in the records of the new inclusions every year. This year, another policy change accounted for the inclusion of citations from newly added articles or early added content in the Journal Citation Report. For instance, suppose an article holds an early access date in one calendar, for example, 2019, but the final publication date is a year after; in 2020, the launch date was considered to be the earlier one from the JCR update.
- JIF Suppression: In case a journal’s citation pattern is deviant from its actual point, its JIF is then suppressed for that whole year. But in such a case, the JIF is excluded from that year’s JCR update, but the journal’s title is still in the Journal Citation Report of that year. In the recent Journal Citation Report of 2022, about three journals were suppressed from their JIFs for the same reason, but their titles were left in the report. The decision of suppressing a JIF is taken by Clarivate, depending on its citation distortion examination. ‘There are two different types of citation distortion, ‘Journal Self-Citation’ and ‘Citation Stacking.’
According to the reports coming from inside Clarivate, from the year 2023 and onwards, the publishing organization is also introducing another kind of suppression distortion for examination, journal self-stacking.
- Covid-19 Pandemic Effect: Like many other aspects of our life and industries across the globe, the covid-19 pandemic has also caused a huge transformation in the academic and journal industry.
Much of this shift and transformation is reflected in the research and JIF trends of the latest JCR update as well. Last year alone, the number of suppressed JIFs in journals from all aspects of sciences has shown an unusual increase, from the year 2019 to the year 2020. This unusual amount of JIFs suppression is highly driven by the covid-19 pandemic-related work disruptions that have caused many published journals to lose their JIFs.
Even this year, the JIFs of many public health and medicine-related journals were 10 times more. In the coming future as well, Covid-19 is anticipated to continue affecting the working patterns of citations and JIFs.
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