Journal impact analysis

The Journal impact tab allows you to perform a quick analysis of the impact of a journal's publications. This tab contains the minimum parameters that are necessary to look up the journal's publications on Google Scholar. Publish or Perish uses these parameters to perform a Google Scholar query, which is then analyzed and converted to a number of statistics. The results are available on-screen and can also be copied to the Windows clipboard (for pasting in other applications) or saved to a text file (for future reference or further analysis).

• For an explanation of the statistics, see the introduction About Publish or Perish.
• See Accuracy of the results for circumstances that make the citations analysis less accurate.
• See More about citation analysis for an in-depth discussion of the validity, assumptions, and limitations of the underlying sources and methods used by Publish or Perish.
• See General search if you want to perform a search with more parameters than available on the Journal impact tab.

How to perform an Journal impact analysis

To perform a basic impact analysis:

1. Start Publish or Perish;
2. Enter the journal title in the Journal title field;
3. Click Lookup or press the Enter button.

The program will now contact Google Scholar to obtain the citations, process the list, and calculate the statistics, which are then displayed in the Impact summary field. The full list of results is also available for inspection or modifications.

Refining your analysis

In many cases, the list of results will contain works of journals that are not the intended journal. You can refine the citation search and analysis with one or more of the following methods.

Tip: Title matching is case-insensitive; Journal, journal, and JOURNAL all match the same publications.

If you change the any of the fields (except the selections in the Results list) , you must resubmit the search by clicking Lookup again.

Quoting the journal's title

By default, Google Scholar matches the title words anywhere in the journal's title, so Journal of Management would be matched by Journal of Management, Strategic Management Journal, The Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, and many others. To match the words in a journal title exactly, put "quotes" around it: "Journal of Management" will only be matched by journals with exactly that phrase in their title: Journal of Management and Journal of Management Studies.

Excluding certain journals

To exclude certain journal titles, enter them in the Exclude these words field. For example, to exclude journals with the word Studies in their title from the earlier example, enter Studies in the Exclude these words field. You can enter more than one exclusion in Exclude these words: British Studies would exclude all journals whose titles contained either or both these words.

Restricting the years of publication

If you know that a certain journal only existed after (or before) a certain year, you can enter the start or end years in the Year of publication between ... and ... fields. You can also use these fields if you want to analyse the journal's publications from a given period.

Restricting the subject areas

If you know the subject area in which the journal is usually classified, you can restrict the search to those areas by checking the corresponding boxes. Please be careful, though: Google's subject classification is not always spot-on. For example, the following journals are classified under Social Sciences rather than Business: Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Management, and The International Journal of Cross-cultural Management.

Searching for citations of chapters in an edited volume

To find citations of chapters that appear in an edited volume, use the following parameters:

• Journal title: enter the title of the edited volume, preferably within quotes.
• Year of publication between ... and ...: enter the copyright year of the volume in both fields.
• Depending on the number of matches that you find, you may want to use the Exclude these words field to restrict the search.

Include or exclude individual works

If the list of results is fairly limited, you can manually include or exclude citations from the analysis by checking or clearing the boxes in the Results list.

Tip: In contrast to the other refinements, changes in the Results list take effect immediately and are reflected in the Impact summary field. You do not have to resubmit your search.

Here are some shortcuts:

• The Select all button places check marks in all boxes;
• The Unselect all button clears all boxes;
• When you use the keyboard to travel up and down in the Results list, pressing the space bar toggles the check mark on and off on the selected line.

Exporting the results

You can export the results as follows:

• Click Copy Results to copy the citation analysis to the Windows clipboard. You can then use the Paste command in most applications (including word processors and spreadsheets) to place the data in another document.
• Choose File > Save Results... from the main menu to save the citation analysis to a text file. On Windows 95, 98, and Me, this will be a plain text file; on Windows NT4, 2000, XP, and later it will be a UTF-8 encoded text file (which retains non-English characters more easily). Most modern word processors and other applications can deal with these.

In the first two cases, only the currently checked citations will be included; they will appear in the order in which they are shown on the screen. You can change the order by clicking on a column header (Cites, Authors, Title, Year, Publication, Publisher) in the Results list.

Important notes and tips

Important notes and tips
	You can cancel a citation lookup by clicking on the Cancel button or pressing the Esc key. However, it may be a few seconds before the program responds.
	The Impact summary field has a scroll bar on its right that you can use to see the remainder of the analysis results.
	The Results list can be sorted by clicking on a column header (Cites, Authors, Title, Year, Publication, Publisher).
	To see all the citing works for an item, double-click on that item in the Results list.
	Depending on the number of citations found and the speed of your Internet connection, the lookup process may take 2-60 seconds.
	The maximum number of referenced works returned by Google Scholar is a little less than 1000.
	The citation analysis is based on the results returned by Google Scholar. These are not always 100% accurate. See Accuracy of the results for some caveats.