You can look up the impact factor of a journal through the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database. A journal's impact factor is a measure of how often the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. The impact factor will help you evaluate a journal's relative importance, especially when you compare it to others in the same field. Not every journal will have an impact factor, but there are other ways to measure impact to a field.
In Journal Citation Reports, enter the title of the journal or browse journals by rank or category.
[Screenshot of a yellow arrow selecting a "Browse by Journal" search in the Journal Citation Reports database]
Clicking on a journal title will give additional details about the calculation. For example, here is an explanation of how impact factor was calculated for the journal Social Work Research.
[Screenshot of an explanation of a journal impact factor calculation]
Use the "All Years" tab to access key metrics and additional data for the current year and all prior years for this journal.
[Screenshot of yellow arrow highlighting the "All Years" tab when searching]
Since impact factors vary widely by discipline, it is helpful to get a baseline for your discipline by searching for subject area (category). Impact factor data is only available for journals indexed by Web of Science.
[Screenshot of search for journal impact factor by subject area]
For more information on citation counts and Impact factors, visit: Evaluating Information Sources: Impact Factors and Citation Counts