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Source: https://guides.library.jhu.edu/metrics/journal-metrics Parent: https://guides.library.jhu.edu/metrics

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Scholarly Metrics

All about metrics: definitions, how-to, and tools.

Find Journal Metrics

Journal metrics allow you to evaluate a journal's performance to support decisions about where to submit your manuscripts and to provide evidence about the impact and value of your works published in a specific journal.

Please remember: metrics provide only part of the story about a journal's utility and reputation. Your librarian can assist you with these metrics and journal evaluation in general. Click on the Cautions about Metrics tab on the left to find out why some measures are problematic, and how to think through evaluating your own and others' work.

The databases listed here also provide basic statistics for journals, such as number of articles published per year, number of citations to the journal each year, and number of references made each year. See definitions for each of the listed metrics in the box below.

Journal Citation Reports

Impact factor, 5-year impact factor, immediacy index, cited half-life, Eigenfactor, Article Influence - CiteScore

This competitor to the Journal Impact Factor is from Elsevier and based on the journals indexed by Scopus. - Cabell's International: Journalytics

scite Index and publishing information including acceptance rates, citation style and more. - Eigenfactor.org

Eigenfactor, Article Influence - Google Scholar Metrics

Provides h5-index and h5-median. - Scopus Journal Analyzer

SJR, SNIP, IPP - SCImago Journal & Country Rank

SJR, country rankings - Top Factor

Journals are evaluated on transparency, openness, and reproducibility. - InCites

Use InCites to determine journal publication metrics by field, institution, granting agency, impact factor, and more. Caution: InCites is curated to represent top journals meeting a quality standard and is therefore not a universal data set. - Dimensions

Use Dimensions to determine journal publication metrics by field, institution, granting agency, and more.

Definitions

Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

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. Remember, JIF attempts to measure *journal* impact and is not an indicator of *article* impact or quality. It is never recommended to use JIF alone to evaluate scholarly output, as it is widely considered to have serious flaws. - CiteScore

The number of citations made in the current year to articles in the previous 3 years of the journal, divided by the total number of articles in the previous 3 years of the journal. - 5-Year Journal Impact Factor

Citations to articles from the most recent five full years, divided by the total number of articles from the most recent five full years. "How much is this journal being cited during the most recent five full years?" - Journal Immediacty Index

Citations to articles from the current year, divided by the total number of articles from the current year. "How much is this journal being cited during the current year?" - 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?" - Eigenfactor

Similar to the 5-Year Journal Impact Factor, but weeds out journal self-citations. It also, unlike the Journal Citation Reports impact factor, cuts across both the hard sciences and the social sciences. - Normalized Eigenfactor

Turns the Eigenfactor into a multiplier. A score of 2 is twice as good as a score of 1; a score of 20 is 4 times as good as a score of 5. - Article Influence

he Eigenfactor score divided by the number of articles published in journal. "I know how impactful the journal as a whole is, but what about the average individual article in the journal?" - SJR - SCImago Journal Rank

This metric doesn't consider all citations of equal weight; the prestige of the citing journal is taken into account. - IPP - Impact Per Publication

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