Citations

G

GCChaahiye

Registered Users (C)
In the case of NIW, could anyone please advise as to how important is the number of citations?

Even after having some good number of publications,if they have very less citations,does it have a negative effect?

Has anyone received an RFE commenting on the number of citations?

Also,would appreciate if anyone can please let me know how to search for citations.

Thanks
 
In my specific case, I submitted evidence of the ISI impact factor of the journals my articles appeared in. ISI is an institute that ranks journals based on the number of citations they receive. ISI does not publish these impact factors publicly - you need a subscription (usually through a university) to access them. These lists are usually published annually - you may be able to find some of the older lists online - try a search engine.

With regard to the importance of citations - I personally do not think this has as much of an effect as is usually made out. Ofcourse, if you are publishing in journals like Science and Nature - it is a different ballgame. However, I think it is the quality of your letters and other supporting evidence (i.e. awards and specifically how you serve the national interest) that will prove much more important.

Good luck
 
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Zaye:

Thanks for your nice input.

I searched for ISI impact factor on Google which returned a few. However,I did not find them useful at all as:

1. they date back to 1991-92 or something like that
2. I got confused :rolleyes:

anyway,do you think the librarian of a university would have any knowledge of this?

how did you calculate?

would the CIS officer know what all this is about? Would he/she give any credit for this ISI impact factor stuff?

any other useful links you/anyone else could give?

thanks
 
thanks alex,

from this link, i see that only those in "nature" group have the highest factors.

lot of journals have factors like .078, .04 , etc.

does this mean that these journals are not good or highly regarded?
 
Impact factor

Hi GCChaahiye:
You can find many universities web-sites update the list of impact factors journals. In general, if the journal's impact factor is greater than 1,then, it is considered to be a good journal. You can find the definition of impact factor as well and explain it in the I-140 application to strenghten your case. Hope this will help.

All the best.
 
Originally posted by GCChaahiye
Zaye:

Thanks for your nice input.

I searched for ISI impact factor on Google which returned a few. However,I did not find them useful at all as:

1. they date back to 1991-92 or something like that
2. I got confused :rolleyes:

anyway,do you think the librarian of a university would have any knowledge of this?

how did you calculate?

would the CIS officer know what all this is about? Would he/she give any credit for this ISI impact factor stuff?

any other useful links you/anyone else could give?

thanks
Click to expand...

Here is one site that has the impact factors uptil 2001: http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~woelfel/impact.html.

Most university libraries will have a subscription to the most recent (2002 or 2003) edition of the ISI impact factors.

In my NIW application, I listed the ISI impact factor for each one of my publications. I also described an impact factor of 3 or higher as being indicative of a well regarded journal and anything above 5 being a good journal. Generally anything below 1 is not regarded as a good journal. There are, however, no set standards for this interpretation.

If the impact factors of particular articles are low, it is probably better to leave out mention of the impact factors from your petition - you should still describe your prominent publications ofcourse.

Also, many university libraries also subscribe to a citation index (also managed by ISI) in which you can search for the number of publications that have specifically cited your article(s). This may be an alternative to listing impact factor if your articles have been highly cited.
 
Hi Zaye
I went to your link for the Impact facort, most numbers are 0,456 etc etc. Did not see any numbers more that 3 or something like that. Could you please tell me how did you interpret? Say I am looking for T ASAE which has 0,456... what does it tell? thanks
 
That site lists many journals with impact factors more than 1. For example: Cancer Res is 8.32; Cell is 29.21 etc etc. etc.

In VERY basic terms, the impact factor is a ratio of how many times articles published in that journal are cited by other journals TO the number of times that journal cites other journal articles. So For example, articles in "Cell" are cited almost 30 times more frequently than Cell cites other journal articles. So basically the impact factor is a measure of how important the articles in that journal are deemed by the rest of the scientific community.

Basically, an impact factor of 1 implies an equal balance between number of cites as described above. There is no official "cut-off" for what impact factor makes a journal a "good" journal. You have to remember that some specialist journals will have very limited readership and therefore are likely to be cited less thereby giving them a low impact factor. This does not necessarily mean that they are bad journals but it does indicate that they have limited relevance and appeal to general scientific community.

In my experience, suitable arbitrary cut-offs are as follows: any journal with an impact factor of 3 or above is decent. 5-6 or higher is good and anything over 10 is exceptional. I would probably avoid mentioning impact factors of less than 1. However, I must add a disclaimer stating that this information is based on my experience with biological/medical journals. I am not sure if similar criteria apply in other fields. But regardless of field, the impact factor is a measure of popularity of that journal in the general scientific community.

Good luck.
 
Also journals can be sorted according to specialty. In one category top of the field journal would have an impact factor of 30, but in another it could be just 8. This web site provides sorting options. For example, I picked "Multidisciplinary sciences", "Experimental Medicine", "Oncology" and "Hematology" and presented the category in which my journals would be closer to the top.
 
I meant that subscription site "Web of Science" has sorting option. These other cites just list journals alphabetically.

One example of already sorted journals according to specialy is at:
http://www.submithelp.de/

But it is based on year 2000 impact factors.
 
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