Research Guides: Scholarly Publishing Guide: Citation-Based Journal Metrics (Impact Factor & Beyond)

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Subjects: OER: Open (or Free) Educational Materials, Scholarly Communication

Understanding Citation-Based Journal Metrics

The tools below can help you compare quantitative, citation-based metrics for journals to which you are considering sending a manuscript.

You may also want to look for journal rankings created by university departments or professional organizations in your field (tip: try Googling something like journal rankings in [field]). These may be tricky to find or may not exist at all, but they can be useful if your field is not well covered in popular tools, or if you believe these tools do not fairly and accurately represent your field.

Note that citation-based metrics can be useful for specific purposes, but they should not be used as a proxy measure for an individual article or individual researcher, nor do they represent the actual "quality" of a journal.

Journal Impact Factor (Clarivate Web of Science)

JCR: InCites Journal Citation Reports This link opens in a new window Tool for evaluating and comparing journals using citation data drawn from scholarly and technical journals from publishers internationally. It is the only source of citation data on journals, and includes virtually all specialties in science, technology, and social sciences.
Journal Citation Reports can show you the:
- Most frequently cited journals in a field
- Highest impact journals in a field
- Hottest journals in a field
- Leading journals in a field
- Most published articles in a field
JCR is available annually in two editions, Science and Social Sciences.

Data Source: Clarivate's Web of Science database

Availability: Found through JCR: Journal Citation Reports from the SHSU Library

What It Is: Ratio comparing number of citations a journal received to the total number of “citable items” in that journal; default covers 2 years, 5-year also available.

Tip for Searching: Be PRECISE, e.g., & versus and; try variations or search by Title Word instead of Full Journal Title.

What It Does Measure:

Influence of a journal on other scholarly journals in terms of citation.
Comparison of journals within a field.

What It Does Not Measure:

Citations outside of the Web of Science database.
Objective quality of a journal.
Comparison of journals in different fields.
Any aspect of an individual article or researcher.
Influence of a journal on policy, practice, or the public.

Criticisms and Limitations to be Aware of:

See also Eigenfactor (gives different weight to individual citations, e.g., "not all citations are created equal")

Eigenfactor.org

CiteScore (Elsevier Scopus)

Scopus Sources

Data source: Elsevier's Scopus database

Availability: Freely available (even though SHSU does not subscribe to Scopus)

What It Is: Citation-based ratio similar to Impact Factor, but some journals may have a CiteScore and not an Impact Factor

CiteScore: Ratio: number of citations 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. Considers "documents" beyond just journal articles, such as editorials, books, conference proceedings, etc.
Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP): measures contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field.
Impact per Publication (IPP): ratio of citations per article published in the journal.

For additional graphs and details, see also:

SCImagoJR.com

Cabell's Metrics

Cabell's Classification Index: Contextual sense of a journal's citation rates; example below, journal is in top 10% in its field in terms of citation distribution. Clicking on the main discipline brings up specific topics and the journal's rank within each.

Difficulty of Acceptance: Relative sense of a journal's acceptance rate within its field.

This video explains the meaning of Cabell's unique metrics and how they are derived.

More Resources

Journal Evaluation Tool
This rubric from Loyola Marymount Univ. & Loyola Law School was developed with open-access journals in mind, but it provides a handy tool for assessing the credibility of almost any journal.
Google Scholar Journal Metrics

Find the h5-index for a particular journal.
Browse a subject area (and sub-category, if available) for top journals in rank order
Does not comprehensively cover all journals

Multidimensional Journal Evaluation: Analyzing scientific periodicals beyond the impact factor
Call Number: Read Online
Since this [Impact] factor only measures the average number of citations per article in a certain time window, it can be argued that it does not reflect the actual value of a periodical. This book defines five dimensions, which build a framework for a multidimensional method of journal evaluation. The author is winner of the Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Scholarship 2011.