What's a journal?

A journal is a scholarly publication containing articles written by researchers, professors and

other experts. Journals focus on a specific discipline or field of study. Unlike newspapers and
magazines, journals are intended for an academic or technical audience, not general readers.

Journal Article

If you have a writing assignment and your instructor asks you to use 'journal articles' in your
research, you might wonder if she means articles from popular magazines and newspapers.
But journal articles are quite a bit different from the kind you find in magazines. For one thing,
journal articles focus on research. They're also written by experts and for other professionals, and
are usually scholarly and peer-reviewed.

Peer-Reviewed

When an article is 'peer-reviewed,' it means that other people with the same academic
background as the author have reviewed the article. It works like this: a biologist wants to
publish the results of some exciting research about how plants respond to music. He writes a
paper about it, and then sends it to the peer-reviewed journal where he wants to publish it. The
journal editors then send the copies of the paper to other experts ('peers') who closely examine it.
When they declare it acceptable, the paper goes to the next stage, which is publication as an
article in a journal.

Dissertation
Sometimes known as a thesis (in some countries, this term is used only for the final assignments
of PhD degrees, while in other countries ‘thesis’ and ‘dissertation’ are interchangeable), a
dissertation is a research project completed as part of an undergraduate or postgraduate degree.
Typically, a dissertation allows students present their findings in response to a question or
proposition that they choose themselves. The aim of the project is to test the independent
research skills students have acquired during their time at university, with the assessment used to
help determine their final grade. Although there is usually some guidance from your tutors, the
dissertation project is largely independent.
For most students this will be the longest, most difficult and most important assignment
completed at university, requiring months of preparation and hard work (the library might
become a second home). However, it can also be very rewarding, particularly if you’re
passionate about your choice of topic. It’s therefore definitely a good idea to make sure you
choose a subject you’re genuinely interested in

Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)

Introduction

The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was an academic publishing service, founded
by Eugene Garfield in Philadelphia in 1960. ISI offered scientometric and bibliographic
database services. Its specialty was citation indexing and analysis, a field pioneered by Garfield.

ISI maintained citation databases covering thousands of academic journals, including a

continuation of its longtime print-based indexing service the Science Citation Index (SCI), as
well as the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation
Index (AHCI). All of these were available via ISI's Web of Knowledge database service. This
database allows a researcher to identify which articles have been cited most frequently, and who
has cited them. The database provides some measure of the academic impact of the papers
indexed in it, and may increase their impact by making them more visible and providing them
with a quality label. Some anecdotal evidence suggests that appearing in this database can double
the number of citations received by a given paper.

The ISI also published the annual Journal Citation Reports which list an impact factor for each
of the journals that it tracked. Within the scientific community, journal impact factors continue to
play a large but controversial role in determining the kudos attached to a scientist's published
research record.
A list of over 14,000 journals was maintained by the ISI. The list included some 1,100 arts and
humanities journals as well as scientific journals. Listings were based on published selection
criteria and is an indicator of journal quality and impact.

ISI published Science Watch, a newsletter which every two months identified one paper
published in the previous two years as a "fast breaking paper" in each of 22 broad fields of
science, such as Mathematics (including Statistics), Engineering, Biology, Chemistry, and The
designations were based on the number of citations and the largest increase from one bimonthly
update to the next. Articles about the papers often included comments by the authors.

The ISI also published a list of "ISI Highly Cited Researchers", one of the factors included in
the Academic Ranking of World Universities published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. This
continues under Clarivate.

History

ISI was acquired by Thomson Scientific & Healthcare in 1992, and became known as Thomson
ISI. It was a part of the Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters until 2016,
when the IP & Science business was sold, becoming Clarivate Analytics.[5] In February 2018,
Clarivate announced it will re-establish ISI as part of its Scientific and Academic Research
group. It exists as a group within Clarivate as of November 2018.

ISI Highly Cited

"ISI Highly Cited" is a database of "highly cited researchers"—scientific researchers whose

publications are most often cited in academic journals over the past decade, published by the
Institute for Scientific Information. Inclusion in this list is taken as a measure of the esteem of
these academics and is used, for example, by the Academic Ranking of World Universities. It
was founded under ISI and as of 2018 continues under the same name at Clarivate.[3]

The methodology for inclusion is to consider papers in the upper first percentile based on citation
counts[7] of all articles indexed in the Scientific Citation Databases and published in a single,
fixed year. Papers in the upper first percentile with respect of their year of publication are called
highly cited papers. Each paper in the data is assigned to one or more of 21 categories, based on
the ISI classification of the journal in which the article was published. The Highly Cited
Researchers list is compiled by selecting, in every field, those researchers with the highest
number of highly cited papers in a 10-year, rolling time period. The number of highly cited
researchers varies from field to field and is determined accordingly to the total number of
researchers contributing to the single field.

The categories are as follows:

 Agricultural Sciences
 Biology & Biochemistry
 Chemistry
 Clinical Medicine
 Computer Science
 Ecology/Environment
 Economics/Business
 Engineering
 Geosciences
 Immunology
 Materials Science
 Mathematics
 Microbiology
 Molecular Biology & Genetics
 Neuroscience
 Pharmacology
 Physics
 Plant & Animal Science
 Psychology/Psychiatry
 Social Sciences - General
 Space Sciences
The publication list and biographical details supplied by the researchers are freely available
online, although general access to the ISI citation database is by subscription.

Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)

The Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) is a commercial citation index product of Clarivate
Analytics. It was originally developed by the Institute for Scientific Information from
the Science Citation Index.

Overview

The SSCI citation database covers some 3,000 of the world's leading academic journals in
the social sciences across more than 50 disciplines.[1] It is made available online through the Web
of Science service for a fee. The database records which articles are cited by other articles.
important databases for secondary data in economics
Secondary data can be obtained from different sources:

 information collected through censuses or government departments like housing, social

security, electoral statistics, tax records
 internet searches or libraries
 Gps, remote sensing
 km progress reports
Administrative data and census
Government departments and agencies routinely collect information when registering people or
carrying out transactions, or for record keeping – usually when delivering a service. This
information is called administrative data.
It can include:

 personal information such as names, dates of birth, addresses

 information about schools and educational achievements
 information about health
 information about criminal convictions or prison sentences
 tax records, such as income
A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the
members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular
population. It is a type of administrative data, but it is collected for the purpose of research at
specific intervals. Most administrative data is collected continuously and for the purpose of
delivering a service to the people.
 HEC Library

HEC Library serves research scholars, teachers and students and also provides services to HEC
employees. The full texts of more than 9000 theses are available online on the HEC website
(www.eprints.hec.gov.pk) where users have the option to retrieve information by subject, title,
name of researcher, year and name of the university.

The HEC Library also provides its users with the facility of Current Contents Services (CSS) and
it plays a pivotal role to provide full access of National Digital Library Resources. Turnitin
facility for plagiarism purpose has also been started for the scholars.

The purpose of the HEC Library:

 To facilitate HEC employees and scholars of universities.

 To provide current and back volumes of national and international journals.
 To provide access of digital library resources.
 To provide archive of journals.
 To provide Turnitin facility for plagiarism.
 To provide the access to thesis online and also in hard form (few).
 To provide the facility of Ulrich's International Periodical directory.
 Turnitin

Turnitin is a comprehensive cloud-based solution integrated into Canvas to help facilitate your
marking and feedback through the Canvas Speedgrader whilst utilising Turnitin's text matching
to check originality in students' work.

The University's policy is that where appropriate, written work must be submitted to
Turnitin and a similarity report must be generated. Turnitin checks submitted assignments
for originality against other students' assignments, against current and archived internet content,
and against the content of major professional journals, periodicals, and business publications,
and can create an originality report for submitted assignments. Student access to originality
reports is an optional feature based on the type of assignment but generally not permitted for
summative assessment.

Functionality

The Turnitin software checks for potentially unoriginal content by comparing submitted papers
to several databases using a proprietary algorithm. It scans its own databases and also has
licensing agreements with large academic proprietary databases.