Industrial & Manufacturing Systems Engineering: Top Journals,
Impact Factors

Go to the Journal Citation Reports and find a ranked list of top journals in

Engineering, Industrial

Engineering, Manufacturing

Operations Research/Management Sciences

You may need to browse journals in other engineering categories and other disciplines to find all journals of interest.

What are impact factors?

The impact factor for journal X = the number of citations in a given year to all articles published in journal X for the previous two years, divided by the number of articles in that journal for those previous two years

What should concern you about cited reference searching and impact factors?

• Citation rates vary widely from field to field and shouldn't be taken at face value, but considered relative to the field of research
• Citation rate may be based on a few prolific authors citing each other, including self citations
• Citation searching works better for journal articles than books
• Coverage of your particular field in the citation database may be weak
• Cross-disciplinary research may produce fewer citations
• Distribution of the citations over time might be more indicative of their importance than an initial high citation count shortly after publication
• Impact factors are a measure the journal as a whole, not individual papers or researchers
• Impact factors may play a too important role in hiring and tenure decisions without considering other measures
• Some journals also cite articles in editorials, reviews, news and other non-research articles to increase the number of cites
• The research may too recent and not widely known, like emerging fields
• The quality of the journal producing the citation
• There is a growing tendency of some researchers to go after topics likely to get into high-impact journals, which jeopardizes creativity, can skew the course or even slow the pace of science
• There is no guarantee that every paper which ought to be cited will be cited. An un-cited author may be ahead of his peers. Mendel and his genetics work went unappreciated for years