Answered By: The Library
Last Updated: Nov 07, 2023     Views: 5780

Use journal metrics to understand the impact of a journal. Impact Factors should be used with other indicators to assess a journal’s impact, such as:

Note: An Impact Factor is only one measure of the relative importance of a journal, individual publication, or researcher to literature and research.

Quartile Rank (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4) – journals that appear in the first quartile of a list (Q1) represent the top 25% of journals in that subject discipline. Key sources are:

The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as indexed by Clarivate's Web of Science.

IF Rank (JIF – Journal Impact Factor): shows the journal’s positional rank within a subject area (e.g., 2/256 means that the journal is ranked 2nd out of 256 journals in that subject area).

Positions are ordered by Journal Impact Factor (JCR) or citation weighting (SJR).

The InCites Explorer is a tool for analyzing the People, Organizations, Regions, Research Areas, Journals, Books, Conference Proceedings and Funding Agencies included in the InCites dataset and is powered by the Web of Science Core Collection indexes. 

SCImago

  • h-index – Although originally conceived as an author-level metric, the h-index has been applied to higher-order aggregations of research publications, including journals. Publishing in a high h-index journal maximises your chances of being cited by other authors and, consequently, may improve your own personal h-index score. In SCImago, the h-index is a journal’s number of articles (h) that have received at least h citations over the whole period.
  • SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) quartiles – for journals from Scopus, this is the best quartile for all subject categories.
  • SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) - is a measure of a journal's impact, influence, or prestige. It is based on the concept of a transfer of prestige between journals via their citation links. It expresses the average number of weighted citations received in the selected year by the documents published in the journal in the three previous years.

Scopus

  • h-index: Originally conceived as an author-level metric, the h-index has been applied to higher-order aggregations of research publications, including journals. Publishing in a high h-index journal maximises your chances of being cited by other authors and, consequently, may improve your own personal h-index score. Scopus Includes Citation Tracker, a feature that shows how often an author has been cited. It is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature.
  • SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) - is a sophisticated metric that accounts for field-specific differences in citation practices.
  • CiteScore metrics – is a family of eight indicators to analyse the publication influence of serial titles. Helps to measure journal citation impact. Reflects the average number of citations to articles published in science and social science journals. Calculated using data from Scopus.

Web of Science

  • Journal Citation Reports (JCR) quartiles are journals which are ranked according to their Journal Impact Factor.
  • IF (JIF - Journal Impact Factor) is the 2-year journal Impact Factor calculated by Clarivate Analytics as all citations to the journal in the current JCR year to items published in the previous two years, divided by the total number of scholarly items.

For further information refer to the Find Scholarly Publishing Outlets library webpage to review the tools to determine strategic publishing or contact your School Librarian

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