What are citation managers?

Citation managers are great tools for organizing your references and producing beautifully formatted bibliographies. Explore the Citations and Bibliographies Guide or the links below to learn more and download a citation manager. The university and university libraries make these products available at no cost to current NU faculty, staff, and students.

Journal Citation Reports

The established source for locating information on journal rankings and impact factors is Journal Citation Reports, accessible through ISI Web of Science.

Journal Citation Reports® is a comprehensive and unique resource that allows you to evaluate and compare journals using citation data drawn from over 11,000 scholarly and technical journals from more than 3,300 publishers in over 80 countries. It is the only source of citation data on journals, and includes virtually all areas of science, technology, and social sciences. Journal Citation Reports can show you the:

  • Most frequently cited journals in a field
  • Highest impact journals in a field
  • Largest journals in a field

Citation and article counts are important indicators of how frequently current researchers are using individual journals. By tabulating and aggregating citation and article counts, JCR offers a unique perspective for journal evaluation and comparison.



Using JCR Wisely

You should not depend solely on citation data in your journal evaluations. Citation data are not meant to replace informed peer review. Careful attention should be paid to the many conditions that can influence citation rates such as language, journal history and format, publication schedule, and subject specialty.

The number of articles given for journals listed in JCR include primarily original research and review articles. Editorials, letters, news items, and meeting abstracts are usually not included in article counts because they are not generally cited. Journals published in non-English languages or using non-Roman alphabets may be less accessible to researchers worldwide, which can influence their citation patterns. This should be taken into account in any comparative journal citation analysis.