One earth, one health

ES274 Article Assessment Assignment

You are asked to choose between two assigned articles. This guide deals with the research you are directed to conduct in Part 2 of your assignment.

Part 2. of your assignment asks you to do the following:

• Identify the journal that has published the article
• Discuss whether the journal seems reputable
• Note any interesting metrics (number of times cited, impact factor, etc.)

How to identify the journal?

This is relatively easy to do using your favourite search engine, though be careful to make sure you are on the actual website for the journal, and not a journal "aggregator" or an umbrella organization that owns the journal. 

• You are looking for a section that will give you information "About this journal" that you can use to answer the question.

How to know if the journal is reputable?

Once you are on the journal website, look for information that answers the following: 

• Who are the editors?
• What are their credentials?
• Who is on the editorial board?
• What are their credentials?
• Is the journal indexed in other databases (like JSTOR)?
• Does it have a journal quality statement?
• Does it have information outlining its publishing standards, such as the peer review process used? 

Reputable journals in the scholarly community should have editors and board members who are experts in their field, with PhDs in the same (or very similar) area in which the journal publishes. The editors are usually practising scholars at a University or research institute. They often include statements about their publishing standards, such as how they undertake peer review.

Non-reputable (sometimes known as predatory) journals have very little information on their websites about their editorial processes. Their editors may be listed, but it is difficult to verify information about them. They are almost always not indexed in other licensed scholarly databases like JSTOR. Their websites are often poorly laid out, with spelling/grammar mistakes or irrelevant text.

How do you find interesting metrics for a journal or an article?

• Does the journal list metrics on its website?

Types of metrics you can find

For articles:

• Times cited: (how often an article is cited by other articles)
  • Find this by typing the article title into Google Scholar, and noting the number shown at "Cited by…"
  • Web of Science also includes this feature for articles; simply do a title search for your article in the WoS database and look for the "Citations" to your article in the results (NOTE: this is different than the "References" that are also given)
    • Web of Science shows citations from scholarly literature; Google Scholar does not - citations can be from non-scholarly sources
       

For Journals:

• Journal impact factor: originally developed by Eugene Garfield and the Institute for Scientific Information, this is now known as the Clarivate Impact Factor
• CiteScore
• Eigenfactor 
• Scimago journal and country rank: ranks journals using the Scimago Journal Rank indicator

How do you examine the discourse surrounding articles?

One of the best ways is to read other articles that cite your original article. You can look for the following:

• A direct discussion of your original article, or its findings
• Citations to the article in the citing article
• More general discussion about issues raised in the original article; some closer reading required here