Purpose: The paper's aim is to propose a core journal decision method, called the local impact factor (LIF), which can evaluate the requirements of the local user community by combining both the access rate and the weighted impact factor, and by tracking citation information on the local users' articles. Design/methodology/approach: Many institutions with a limited budget can subscribe only to the most valuable journals for their users. The importance of a journal to a local community can be calculated in many ways. This paper takes both global and local access frequency and journal citations into consideration. The method of weighted web page link analysis is adopted. Findings: This paper finds that the weighted page rank may be used efficiently in the core journal decisions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LIF can effectively suggest journals to local users better than existing methods (i.e. impact factor or the local journal rank). Research limitations/implications: This research requires the determination of the thesis scores, which needs authorisation from the authors. If the scores are not available, the scores may be subjectively assigned or retrieved from the other resources. Practical implications: A case study in National Cheng Kung University was conducted to show that the LIF can be used to help library managers evaluate the real demands of local community users. Originality/value: Rather than existing research, this paper focuses on the utilisation and requirements of local community users and also finds the contributions of citation information to be significant and critical. (Contains 9 figures.)