Impact Factor

I went to a journal workshop today at Cais. It was conducted by people from Thomson Reuters. I was the only postgrad there (the rest were lecturers and staffs because the workshop targeted academicians and I'm the only 'kepo' who try to register). I actually registered for another workshop by CAIS on 'Scopus' but the librarian emailed me to days ago to inform me that it has been rescheduled to tomorrow afternoon. He also provided me info on this journal workshop. I was attracted by the words 'End Note' and 'Thomas Reuters' and so decided to go for it. Amusingly, this morning I just smsed my boss telling him I would be joining a workshop so won't be going to lab, ended up I met him there at the workshop too. More amusingly, I actually went to the wrong seminar at Level 1 Cais, and was forced to listen to the opening speech about Intellectual property before I realised it was not what I intended.

Anyway, the journal workshop is a beneficial one. I get to know what is 'impact factor', 'cited half life', 'immediacy index', 'journal citation report', the scientific journal selection process done by Thomson Reuters and how the Web of Science database and JCR can help us researchers in terms of discovery, evaluation and deciding where to publish. I didn't understand how impact factor is calculated and who actually release this until I attended the workshop. There was a hands on session in the afternoon in which we explored the trial version of Web of Science and also EndNoteX2 to understand the features better. The trainer Dr Lim is really good in training. He himself has undergone the research process and has published many papers and so he really understands our situation and can tap into our needs. I sincerely hope in the near future Cais can purchase Web of Science and get a web site license for EndNoteX2 so that we can benefit from there.