LibGuides: Transition from Web of Science to Scopus: Journal Metrics

Journal Metrics

What are journal metrics?

Knowing the impact and importance of a journal can help you decide where to submit your articles. Citation tracking databases like Scopus or the Web of Science allow you to compare journals based on how many citations articles in those journals receive. Journal metrics are one way to consider the relative stature of a publication venue and measure some aspect of how often articles in the journal are cited. Journal metrics are not a reflection of the stature of an individual author or article.

Common Journal Metrics

Journal Impact Factor via Journal Citation Reports (Web of Science)
The annual Journal Citation Reports impact factor is a ratio between citations and recent citable items published and is based on Web of Science citation data. The impact factor of a journal is calculated by dividing the number of current year citations to the source items published in that journal during the previous two years
CiteScore (Scopus)
Calculating the CiteScore is based on the number of citations to documents (articles, reviews, conference papers, book chapters, and data papers) by a journal over four years, divided by the number of the same document types indexed in Scopus and published in those same four years.
SJR SCImago Journal Rank (Scopus)
SJR is a free online portal based on citation data tracked in Elsevier’s Scopus database. The ranking system incorporates citation data as well as relationships among journals (via citations). The SJR algorithm weights citations from journals according to how highly cited the journal itself is, which differs from the JCR (Journal Citation Reports) which weights all articles identically, regardless of their source.
The SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) indicator expresses the average number of weighted citations received in the selected year by the documents published in the selected journal in the three previous years: i.e., weighted citations received in year X (2019) to documents published in the journal in years X-1 (2018), X-2 (2017), and X-3 (2016).
Eigenfactor Score (Web of Science)
A journal's Eigenfactor score is our measure of the journal's total importance to the scientific community. Based on citation data from the Web of Science, Eigenfactor scores are scaled so that the Eigenfactor scores of all journals listed in Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports (JCR) sum to 100. Thus, if a journal has an Eigenfactor score of 1.0, it has 1% of the total influence of all indexed publications. In 2013, the journal Nature has the highest Eigenfactor score, with a value of 1.603.