How do I find journal impact measures?
How do I find journal impact measures?
Answer
Journal impact measures use publication and citation analysis to produce ranked lists of journal titles and provide an indication of the perceived quality of the journal. Each journal ranking tool uses different metrics and includes different journal titles. The most recognized measures are listed below. The “More information” link provides information about how the score is derived.
For those in the sciences, please consult our "Measuring Research Impact in the Sciences" guide. For additional discipline-specific suggestions, contact a subject librarian.
- Scopus: This database provides three journal impact measures. Sign in with your SDSUid and use the Sources link at the top of the main screen.
- CiteScore measures average citations received per document published in the serial. More information
- SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) measures weighted citations received by the serial. Citation weighting depends on subject field and prestige (SJR) of the citing serial. More information
- SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) measures actual citations received relative to citations expected for the serial’s subject field. More information
- Eigenfactor: Journals are rated according to the number of incoming citations, with citations from highly ranked journals weighted to make a larger contribution to the Eigenfactor than those from poorly ranked journals. More information
- Google Scholar Rankings: Calculates two measures for journal ranking. The h5-index is the h-index for articles published in the last 5 complete years. It is the largest number h such that h articles published in 2015-2019 have at least h citations each. The h5-median for a publication is the median number of citations for the articles that make up its h5-index. More information
- Impact Factor (IF or JIF): The proprietary Impact Factor is calculated yearly starting from 1975 for journals listed in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The SDSU Library does not subscribe to this publication.
- Cabell’s Directories: This database includes two measures, an evaluation of Journal Acceptance Difficulty and an Altmetric Report, an overview of where and how often articles are mentioned online. More information
For more information about the use of journal impact measures in evaluation, see the Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics published as “Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics” in Nature 520, 429–431 (23 April 2015) doi:10.1038/520429a.