What scientific journals can tell us about scientific journals

Citation analysis provides a tool for the evaluation of the relative importance of journals as well as papers. A publication, the ISI Journal Citation Reports, is issued primarily to permit users to make such evaluations by answering the basic questions: How often has a journal been cited? What journals have cited it and how frequently? What journals has it cited and how frequently? These data have been conditioned by the inclusion of a `relative impact factor´ to give additional weight to the significance of the articles it publishes. The information thus developed is particularly attractive to librarians, journal editors and publishers, individual scientists, and science policy-makers.