How do I find metrics to measure a journal's impact?
Answer
Journal metrics provide extra insight into three aspects of our journals – impact, speed and reach – and help authors select a journal when submitting an article for publication.
Scopus can be used to find some of the most popular citation-based metrics at the journal level. Select 'Sources' at the top of the Scopus homepage.
- CiteScore is an average of the sum of the citations received in a given year to publications published in the previous three years divided by the sum of publications in the same previous three years.
- SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) is based on the concept of a transfer of prestige between journals via their citation links. SJR weights each incoming citation to a journal by the SJR of the citing journal, with a citation from a high-SJR source counting for more than a citation from a low-SJR source. Like CiteScore, SJR accounts for journal size by averaging across recent publications and is calculated annually.
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Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) is a sophisticated metric that intrinsically accounts for field-specific differences in citation practices. It does so by comparing each journal’s citations per publication with the citation potential of its field, defined as the set of publications citing that journal. SNIP measures contextual citation impact and enables direct comparison of journals in different subject fields.