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Measuring Your Research Impact: Journal Level Metrics / Rankings / Impact Factor

This guide introduces the Carnegie Mellon University community to available research metrics resources

Introduction to Journal Ranking

Journal rankings use bibliometrics to measure the impact of a journal as a whole.  They can be used for publication venue choices and collection building or assessment.

Journal Metrics from Scopus

  • SJR-Scimago
  • SNIP-Source-Normalized Impact per Paper

Journal Impact Factor

Eigenfactor​

Journal Ranking Tools

Journal Metrics from Scopus

Scopus Sources This site offers 4 metrics on journals 

Elsevier metrics are based on data from their Scopus platform. Although SHSU does not subscribe to Scopus, these metrics are made freely available online

CiteScore: Ratio: the number of citations a journal receives in one year to documents published in the previous three years, divided by the number of documents indexed in Scopus published in the same three years. Think of it as a competitor to Impact Factor, in that it uses a similar citation-based formula,

  • covers more journals (provider Elsevier claims it covers "twice as many journals that have an Impact Factor";
  • considers "documents" beyond just journal articles, such as editorials, books, conference proceedings, etc;
  • seeks to be a more transparent and reproducible metric.

SNIP - Source-Normalized Impact per Paper: SNIP weights citations based on the number of citations in a field. If there are fewer total citations in a research field, then citations are worth more in that field.

IPP - Impact Per Publication: Also known as RIP (raw impact per publication), the IPP is used to calculate SNIP. IPP is a number of current-year citations to papers from the previous 3 years, divided by the total number of papers in those 3 previous years.

SJR- Scimago Journal & Country Rank: SCImago Journal Rank is a prestige metric based on the idea that 'all citations are not created equal'. With SJR, the subject field, quality, and reputation of the journal have a direct effect on the value of a citation.

Eigenfactor

EigenfactorThe number of times, in the past five years, that articles from a journal have been cited in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The Eigenfactor score considers which journals have contributed these citations and removes journal self-citations

Journal Impact Factor

Journal Impact Factor

The number of citations made in the current year to articles in the previous 2 years, divided by the total number of citable articles from the previous 2 years.

The Journal Impact Factor was the first metric created for scholarly journals. Eugene Garfield first introduced the idea of an impact factor in 1955. It was used to determine the impact a particular journal has in a given field of research and published annually in Journal Citation Reports.

 

The Journal Impact Factor was the only metric available for many years but now other metrics are also available.

Related Definition

Journal Cited Half-Life

For the current Journal Citation Reports year, the median age of journal articles cited. "What is the duration of citation to articles in this journal?"

h5-index

This metric is based on the articles published by a journal over 5 calendar years. h is the largest number of articles that have each been cited h times. A journal with an h5-index of 43 has published, within a 5-year period, 43 articles that each have 43 or more citations.