On June 30, 2021, Clarivate Analytics, a provider of specialized information services, released its 2021 Journal Citation Reports (JCR). JCR counts and calculates the citation data of more than 8,000 journals including 3,800 core journals included in SCI every year, and reports the Impact Factor and other indexes for each journal. The report is regularly published by ISI every year. The impact factor comprehensively reflects the influence of the research results reported in the journal and the academic level of the journal, and provides an important reference for the authors to submit papers for publication.
In this year's JCR report, the research team looked at changes in impact factors in 14 journals covering three areas: "Engineering Construction and Management", "Civil Engineering Informatization", and "Disaster Risk and Resilience". The specific changes are summarized as follows:
Change in impact factors of important journals in related fields
In general, compared with last year, the impact factors of all journals have increased, and the increase of several important journals in the field of "Engineering Construction and Management" is the most obvious. Among them, the impact factors of "Journal of Management in Engineering" and "IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management" increased by 139% and 121% respectively. In addition, the impact factor of "Sustainable Cities and Society" and "Automation in Construction" also increased significantly by 2.319 and 2.031, respectively.
The continuous increase of the impact factor reflects the healthy development of relevant disciplines and the increasing popularity of important journals in the field, which is undoubtedly good news for relevant research teams. However, this change also stems from two objective reasons. First, the number of journals included in the JCR has increased year by year, and the "Number of citations" used to calculate the impact factor has increased. On the other hand, Early Access Publications were included in the impact factor for the first time this year, which led to some “inflation” in the journal impact factor, with an average increase of around 48%. Therefore, JCR or citation data may not be the only dimension to evaluate journals. Researchers can select and evaluate relevant journals by taking other factors into consideration.
