Okay, so I’ve been digging into this whole “academic journal” thing, and a big question for me was figuring out which journals are, you know, good. That’s where the “impact factor” comes in. Today, I focused on the Journal of Community Psychology.
First, I hit up Google Scholar. Just typed in “Journal of Community Psychology impact factor”. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting much. I figured it’d be buried in some obscure academic database.
The search results? Kind of a mixed bag. I saw a bunch of different numbers, and some websites looked, well, sketchy. No clear winner at first, which was frustrating.
Trying to Make Sense of it All
I started clicking through the results, mostly just skimming. I noticed a few sites that kept popping up: ResearchGate, ScimagoJR, and a couple of others I didn’t recognize. I opened each in a new tab, planning to compare.
- ResearchGate: It showed an impact factor, but I wasn’t sure how up-to-date it was. Plus, ResearchGate is kind of like social media for academics, right? So I wasn’t 100% trusting it.
- ScimagoJR: This one looked a little more official. It had a whole page dedicated to the journal, with graphs and stuff. I felt like it was at least trying to be legit. It had a specific number, and it seemed more consistent with what I found elsewhere.
Digging Deeper
I then decided to get a little more serious. So I learned to use something called “SJR indicator” to verify. That is, find a reasonable range, so that I can estimate the impact factor of the journal and evaluate whether it is good or not.
After a bit more digging and comparing numbers across different sites, I started to get a general sense of the impact factor. It’s not a super high-impact journal, but it’s definitely respectable within its field. I figured out It is good enough for me!
