University of St.Gallen (HSG) | Library | Journal and article rating

Assessing a journal / a journal article

Define wether a journal is scientific or popular science:

Pay attention to wether a bibliography or footnotes exist.
Information about the author and his qualification / assimilation should be mentioned.
Check if the journal is peer-reviewed or refereed. A peer reviewed article has been examined for quality and originality by independent scientists.

The following infographic gives a good overwiew (in German):

Finding peer-reviewed journals

In HSGswisscovery, as well as some databases, offers the possibility to restrict your search to peer-reviewed journals

Some databases like Web of Science or Scopus on principle only list refereed journals.
Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory can be useful to identify peer-reviewed journals.

Citation Indices: Which journal has been cited often?

Which journal has been cited often? With the help of citation indices you can find out which scientific value a publication has in its field. This is expressed by the Impact factors, which is genereated mathematically for each journal.

Web of Science
Interdisciplinary database that shows, among others, how often an article has been cited. Use the Cited Reference Search and enter the journal title in abbreviated form. You will get a list of articles from this journal with the according number of "hits".

Scopus
Interdisciplinary database that shows, among others, how often an article has been cited and how relevant it is compared to similar articles. Analytical tools allow you to visualize your results.

Journal Citation Reports (JCR)
Contains a journal ranking. Choose your field, click on „Submit“ and sort the list by "Impact Factor".

Screenshot JCR

More Journal rankings in economics:
IDEAS/RePEc Recursive Discounted Impact Factors for Journals
VHB-Jourqual 3

Judging the relevance of an author

Biographical information about authors and scientists may be found for example here:

Kürschners Deutscher Gelehrten-Kalender: bio-bibliographical Index of German scientists of the present age.
International: Nexis Uni
The citation index Web of Science allows you to find out what influence a certain author has had on the research of other scientists in the field.

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Assessing a journal / a journal article

Finding peer-reviewed journals

Citation Indices: Which journal has been cited often?

Judging the relevance of an author