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.
- EndNoteCourtesy of NU, create your own citation database on your computer and auto-format citations within your papers. Particularly strong on the journal article front, since EndNote includes thousands of journal styles, allowing you to change formatting in one simple step.
- MendeleyFree software that will help manage research, annotate PDFs, and format citations. Mendeley has both a cloud-based and desktop component.
- RefWorksSimilar to EndNote though considered slightly more user-friendly, lets you create your own citation database on the RefWorks company website, and use that database to auto-format citations within your papers. Has many journal styles, though not as many as EndNote.
- ZoteroZotero allows you to collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. Add sources right from your browser as you move through library databases or the Web.
- BibTex and LaTexBibTeX is both a bibliographic flat-file database file format and a software program for processing these files to produce lists of references.
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.
- Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate) This link opens in a new windowJCR is a widely used source of citation data, used to compare and evaluate scholarly journals. For example, the most well-known indicator in the JCR is the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). This measure provides a ratio of citations to a journal in a given year to the citable items in the prior two years. 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
Includes virtually all areas of science, technology, and social sciences. Covers 1997-present.
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.