Clinical Professionals

Open access is a means of taking advantage of the global reach and relative inexpense of internet publishing to make peer-reviewed scholarly content freely available.

• Open Access Research Guide includes information about transformative agreements, open access publishers and repositories, predatory publishing, USC Open Access Task Force.

The journal impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the "average article" in a journal has been cited in a particular year. The impact factor will help you evaluate a journal's relative popularity or importance* when compared to others in the same field. * Impact factors are not without controversy and does not necessarily denote article or journal quality.

Impact Factors, and other measures of scholarly impact provides more information about the nuances and biases inherent in the system.

The impact factor of a particular journal can be looked up through the Journal Citation Reports database. 

The newest edition of Journal Citation Reports is a year behind the current year. You can search for a specific Journal title, or Categories & Subject area, Publisher, or Countries. Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is included as a column for many of the output lists and for each individual Journal record. It is possible to search by Publisher, and then filter by Categories or Subject for an output list. Impact factor data is only available for journals indexed by Web of Science.

Learn more by taking the Scholarly Impact Challenge!

Google Scholar Metrics allow authors to view the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications. Scholar Metrics summarizes recent citations to many publications and help authors as they consider where to publish their new research. 

Within Google Scholar select the three horizontal lines for Settings, then select Metrics. This will take you to Top publications - English. Choose the VIEW ALL link for more options. Select the dropdown arrow to see Categories, Health & Medical Sciences was selected, then choose the sub-category, Nursing has been selected in the example below.

You can also view publications in different languages by selecting the dropdown arrow next to English.