Library: Faculty Scholarly Publishing: Journal Rankings & Impact

Journal Rankings & Impact

Journal & Author Metrics

The chart below shows the several categories of bibliometrics. Some like Journal Impact Factor describe the impact of journals while others such as H-index describe the impact of individual Scholars.

Assessment of leading publication metrics and altmetrics in regard to open science principles (Herb, 2016).

*Metric*	*Provider*	*Sources*	*Free access*	*Data access*	*Measure Entity*	*Buffalo State Access*
Journal Impact Factor (JIF)	Clarivate	Web of Science – Journal Citation Reports	No	No	Journal	No
Journal Citation Indicator (JCI)	Clarivate	Web of Science*	No	No	Journal	Yes
SCImago Journal Rank	Elsevier	Scopus	Yes	Yes	Journal	Yes
SNIP	Elsevier	Scopus	Yes	Yes	Journal	No
Eigenfactor	Clarivate	Web of Science	No	No	Journal	No
Google Journal Ranking	Google Scholar	Google Scholar	Yes	No	Journal	Yes
h-index	Clarivate	Web of Science*	No	No	Author	Yes
h-index	Elsevier	Scopus	No	No	Author	No
h-index	Google Scholar	Google Scholar	Yes	No	Author	Yes
Altmetrics	PLoS Metrics	Varied sources	No	No	Article	Partial
Altmetrics	Altmetrics	Varied sources	Partial	No	Article	Partial
Altmetrics	Plum Metrics	Varied sources	Yes	Yes	Article	Partial
Altmetrics	ImpactStory	Varied sources	Yes	Yes	Article	Partial
Open Citation Data	Open Corpus	Varied sources	Yes	Yes	Article	Yes

*Web of Science H-Index is part of E. H. Butler Library's subscription

Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

(JIF) is a journal impact measurement metric that is currently owned by Clarivate and hosted on the Web of Science citation Index database. In order to have an Impact Factor, a journal must be indexed in Web of Science Core Collection. The presence of a journal in the Core Collection will automatically boost the impact of a journal as that title will be considered as a "core" title.

The Impact Factor (JIF) is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. It is used to measure the importance or rank of a journal by calculating the times its articles are cited.

Calculation of 2023 JIF of a journal:

A = the number of times articles published in 2020 and 2021 were cited by indexed journals during 2022.

B = the total number of "citable items" published in 2020 and 2021.

A/B = 2022 Impact Factor

Image from Medical College of Wisconsin LibGuides: https://mcw.libguides.com/research-impact/journal

Finding the Impact Factor of a Journal

Butler Library does not currently hold a subscription to Journal Citation Reports (Web of Science). Many times a journal publisher site will list the impact factor for a particular journal. If you are looking for an impact factor for a specific title, please contact a librarian for help.

Journal Impact Factor (JIF) Tutorial

Journal Impact Factor Readings

Lariviere, V., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2018). The Journal Impact Factor: A brief history, critique, and discussion of adverse effects. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1801.08992
The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is, by far, the most discussed bibliometric indicator. Since its introduction over 40 years ago, it has had enormous effects on the scientific ecosystem: transforming the publishing industry, shaping hiring practices and the allocation of resources, and, as a result, reorienting the research activities and dissemination practices of scholars.
Garfield E. (2006). The History and Meaning of the Journal Impact Factor. JAMA, 295(1), 90–93.
I first mentioned the idea of an impact factor in Science in 1955. With support from the National Institutes of Health, the experimental Genetics Citation Index was published, and that led to the 1961 publication of the Science Citation Index. Irving H. Sher and I created the journal impact factor to help select additional source journals. To do this we simply re-sorted the author citation index into the journal citation index. From this simple exercise, we learned that initially a core group of large and highly cited journals needed to be covered in the new Science Citation Index (SCI). Consider that, in 2004, the Journal of Biological Chemistry published 6500 articles, whereas articles from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences were cited more than 300 000 times that year. Smaller journals might not be selected if we rely solely on publication count, so we created the journal impact factor (JIF).
Greenwood, D. C. (2007). Reliability of journal impact factor rankings. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 7(1), 48–48.
Journal impact factors and their ranks are used widely by journals, researchers, and research assessment exercises. Based on citations to journals in research and experimental medicine in 2005, Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo methods were used to estimate the uncertainty associated with these journal performance indicators.

SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)

The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.).” Scopus contains more than 15,000 journals from over 4,000 international publishers as well as over 1000 open access journals. SCImago's "evaluation of scholarly journals is to assign weights to bibliographic citations based on the importance of the journals that issued them, so that citations issued by more important journals will be more valuable than those issued by less important ones. (SJR Indicator)

SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)
The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a publicly available portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.). These indicators can be used to assess and analyze scientific domains. Journals can be compared or analysed separately. Country rankings may also be compared or analysed separately. Journals can be grouped by subject area (27 major thematic areas), subject category (309 specific subject categories) or by country. Citation data is drawn from over 34,100 titles from more than 5,000 international publishers and country performance metrics from 239 countries worldwide. The SJCR allows you also to embed significative journal metrics into your web as a clickable image widget

SCImago Video Tutorial

SCImago Ranking Selected Readings

Mañana-Rodríguez, J. (2015). A critical review of SCImago Journal & Country Rank. Research Evaluation, 24(4), 343–354.
Since the use for evaluation purposes of the SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) is increasingly being considered, it is pertinent to carry out a qualitative and quantitative analysis from a theoretical and practical perspective. The aim of this article is the analysis of the advantages and limitations of SJR.
Ali, S., & Bano, S. (2021). Visualization of Journal ranking using Scimago: An Analytical tool. Library Philosophy and Practice, 1–12.
In the field of research various bibliometric indicators exist and the efficient use of such indicators has given rise to the publication of in-depth studies on the advantages and disadvantages of each of these indicators. However to evaluate the impact of scholarly journals number of metrics have been developed based on citation counts. These metrics represent scientific impact as a function not of just the quality of citations received but of a combination of the quality and the quantity. For example, the Scimago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator, is a size-independent, web-based metric aimed at measuring the current "average prestige per paper" of journals.

Journal Citation Indicator (JCI)

The Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) is a relatively new journal impact metric that can be found in the Web of Science database. Based on the popular Journal Impact Factor (JIF), the Journal Citation Indicator attempts to normalize the the impact factor across disciplines to make a more accurate and comparable number. While there are many benefits to the JCI, there are doubts over whether Clarivate achieved a normalized number (Davis, 2021).

Clarivate describes the JCI: "The new Journal Citation Indicator meets this requirement for journal evaluation, providing a single number that accounts for the specific characteristics of different fields and their publications. Although the calculations behind the Journal Citation Indicator are complex, requiring considerable computing power, the end result is simple: a single value that is easy to interpret and compare, complementing current journal metrics and further supporting responsible use."

Unlike the impact factor that can see escalated values for popular scholarly publications, the JIC compresses the number through normalization to make it easily comparable. There are three things to remember when working with Journal Citation Indicators:

Normalization is a difficult concept to achieve with journal metrics across the disciplines, to quote Ludo Waltman, "This is something all bibliometricians are struggling with. Field normalization does not make things perfectly comparable across fields, but it does make things more comparable. Explaining what field normalization does and does not accomplish therefore is not at all trivial […] I don’t think I managed to solve the problem of how to give a clear, easy-to-understand, and accurate explanation of what field normalization does and does not do!" (as cited in Davis, 2018).
Journal Citation Indicator is based on three years of data rather than just two years of citation data like the Journal Impact Factor.
Journal Citation Indicators assume an average score of 1.0. That is, an average journal's citation impact score would be a 1.0, anything higher would be considered above average and below 1.0 would be considered below average.

How to Access Journal Citation Indicators in Web of Science

Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Search for citations to scholarly journal articles in all subject areas. Conduct cited reference searches for articles that cite a previously published work (1970 - present).

Unfortunately, there is no way to conduct a journal search in Web of Science to acquire a journal's JCI. The easiest way to find a JCI is to look up an article that was published in the journal you are interested in:

Click on the Journal to find the JCI score:

Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) Selected Readings

Szomszor, M. (2021, May 20). Introducing the new journal citation indicator: A new, field-normalized measurement of journal citation impact. Clarivate Academia and Government Blog. https://clarivate.com/blog/introducing-the-journal-citation-indicator-a-ne
This is the second in a series of updates to provide information on the launch of the 2021 Journal Citation Reports release. You can read about Journal Citation Reports 2022 here.
Huh, S. (2021). The Journal Citation Indicator has arrived for Emerging Sources Citation Index journals, including the Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions, in June 2021. Journal of Educational Evaluation for Health Professions, 18, 20
On June 30, 2021, I was notified that the 2020 Journal Citation Ranking (JCR) had been published. The most striking feature was a new citation index, the Journal Citation Indicator (JCI). Szomszor [1] announced on Clarivate’s blog, “The JCI provides a single journal-level metric that can be easily interpreted and compared across disciplines. The value of the JCI is the mean Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) for all articles and reviews published in a journal in the preceding 3 years” [1]. The main difference between the JCI and the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is that the denominator of the JCI is the number of reviews and articles for only the most recent 3 years, while the numerator is the citations of those reviews and articles for 4 years, including the current year. A JCI value of 1.0 corresponds to the mean value of each category of journals in the Web of Science Core Collection. A JCI value of 2 indicates that the citation impact of a journal in the corresponding category is 2 times the mean value., whereas a JCI value of 0.5 means that a journal’s impact is half of the mean value in the corresponding category.
Davis, P. (2021, May 24). Journal Citation Indicator: Just another tool in Clarivate's metrics toolbox? The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/05/24/journal-citation-indicator/
On May 20, Clarivate Analytics announced that it had created a new metric for comparing the relative citation performance of journals across different disciplines. It calls this metric, the Journal Citation Indicator (JCI).

Journal Eigenfactor

The Eigenfactor Score measures the number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) year. Like the Impact Factor, the Eigenfactor Score is essentially a ratio of number of citations to total number of articles.

Eigenfactor Score:

Counts citations to journals in both the sciences and social sciences.
Eliminates self-citations. Every reference from one article in a journal to another article from the same journal is discounted.
Weights each reference according to a stochastic measure of the amount of time researchers spend reading the journal.

Source: Maryland University Libraries Libguides. https://lib.guides.umd.edu/bibliometrics/eigenfactor#:~:text=The%20Eigenfactor%20Score%20measures%20the,to%20total%20number%20of%20articles.

*Currently Eigenfactor is a part of the Clarivate Journal Citation Reports (JCR) in Web of Science. Butler Library does not subscribe to JCR.

The former Eigenfactor platform is still active, but only includes journal Eigenfactors up to 2015.

Eigenfactor
Eigenfactor.org is a website which ranks the importance and quality of research journals in many subject fields. Use this source to search by journal name, publication year, or subject categories developed by ISI/Web of Science. Developed at the University of Washington.

Eigenfactor Journal Score Selected Readings

Bergstrom, C. (2007). Eigenfactor: Measuring the value and prestige of scholarly journals. College & Research Libraries News, 68(5), 314–316.
An iterative ranking scheme, called Eigenfactor, accounts for the fact that a single citation from a high-quality journal may be more valuable than multiple citations from peripheral publications. A close look at how the Eigenfactor scheme works is presented.
An iterative ranking scheme, called Eigenfactor, accounts for the fact that a single citation from a high-quality journal may be more valuable than multiple citations from peripheral publications. A close look at how the Eigenfactor scheme works is presen
In this article, we show how the Eigenfactor score, originally designed for ranking scholarly journals, can be adapted to rank the scholarly output of authors, institutions, and countries based on author‐level citation data. Using the methods described in this article, we provide Eigenfactor rankings for 84,808 disambiguated authors of 240,804 papers in the Social Science Research Network (SSRN)—a preprint and postprint archive devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the social sciences and humanities. As an additive metric, the Eigenfactor scores are readily computed for collectives such as departments or institutions as well. We show that a collective's Eigenfactor score can be computed either by summing the Eigenfactor scores of its members or by working directly with a collective‐level cross‐citation matrix. We provide Eigenfactor rankings for institutions and countries in the SSRN repository. With a network‐wide comparison of Eigenfactor scores and download tallies, we demonstrate that Eigenfactor scores provide information that is both different from and complementary to that provided by download counts. We see author‐level ranking as one filter for navigating the scholarly literature, and note that such rankings generate incentives for more open scholarship, because authors are rewarded for making their work available to the community as early as possible and before formal publication.

Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)

Source-normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) is a field normalised assessment of journal impact. SNIP scores are the ratio of a source's average citation count and 'citation potential'. Citation potential is measured as the number of citations that a journal would be expected to receive for its subject field. Essentially, the longer the reference list of a citing publication, the lower the value of a citation originating from that publication. SNIP therefore allows for direct comparison between fields of research with different publication and citation practices.

The Scopus database is the source of data used to calculate SNIP scores. SNIP is calculated as the number of citations given in the present year to publications in the past three years divided by the total number of publications in the past three years. A journal with a SNIP of 1.0 has the median (not mean) number of citations for journals in that field.

SNIP only considers for peer reviewed articles, conference papers and reviews.

SNIP scores are available from the two databases:

CWTS Journal Indicators
Scopus (Currently Not Subscribed through Butler Library)

Source James Cook University, Australia LibGuides. https://libguides.jcu.edu.au/research-indicators/snip-and-sjr#:~:text=Source%2Dnormalized%20Impact%20per%20Paper%20(SNIP)%20is%20a%20field,receive%20for%20its%20subject%20field.

CWTS Journal Indicators
CWTS Journal Indicators provides free access to bibliometric indicators on scientific journals. The indicators have been calculated by Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) based on the Scopus bibliographic database produced by Elsevier. Indicators are available for over 20,000 journals indexed in the Scopus database.

Tutorial on CWTS Journal Indicators

CWTS Journal Indicators Selected Readings

Leydesdorff, L., & Opthof, T. (2010). Scopus’s source normalized impact per paper (SNIP) versus a journal impact factor based on fractional counting of citations. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(11), 2365–2369.
Impact factors (and similar measures such as the Scimago Journal Rankings) suffer from two problems: (a) citation behavior varies among fields of science and, therefore, leads to systematic differences, and (b) there are no statistics to inform us whether differences are significant. The recently introduced "source normalized impact per paper" indicator of Scopus tries to remedy the first of these two problems, but a number of normalization decisions are involved, which makes it impossible to test for significance. Using fractional counting of citations—based on the assumption that impact is proportionate to the number of references in the citing documents—citations can be contextualized at the paper level and aggregated impacts of sets can be tested for their significance. It can be shown that the weighted impact of Annals of Mathematics (0.247) is not so much lower than that of Molecular Cell (0.386) despite a five-f old difference between their impact factors (2.793 and 13.156, respectively).
Moed, H. F. (2011). The source normalized impact per paper is a valid and sophisticated indicator of journal citation impact [Letter to the Editor]. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(1), 211–213.
The article “Scopus’s Source Normalized Impact per Paper
(SNIP) Versus a Journal Impact Factor Based on Fractional
Counting of Citations,” by Loet Leydesdorff and Tobias
Opthof (2010), deals with an important subject, the construction of “field normalized” indicators of the citation impact of
scientific-scholarly journals.

Google Scholar Journal Metrics

Google Scholar allows you to Browse the Top 100 publications in multiple languages and by subject categories. The ranking is based on a 5-Year h-index and a h-median.

h-index definition: "A scientist has index h if h of his/her N_ppapers have at least h citations each, and the other (N_p − h) papers have no more than h citations each" (Hirsch, 2005).
To get started, you can browse the top 100 publications in several languages, ordered by their five-year h-index and h-median metrics. To see which articles in a publication were cited the most and who cited them, click on its h-index number to view the articles as well as the citations underlying the metrics.
You can also explore publications in research areas of your interest. To browse publications in a broad area of research, select one of the areas in the left column. To explore specific research areas, select one of the categories areas, then click on the "Subcategories" link and then select one of the options.

Google Scholar Journal Metrics
Google Scholar Metrics provide an easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications. Scholar Metrics summarize recent citations to many publications, to help authors as they consider where to publish their new research.
Google Scholar Journal Metrics Areas of Interest
To explore specific research areas, select one of the "categories" areas, click on the "Subcategories" link and then select one of the options.

Google Scholar Metrics Overview

Available Metrics:

The h-index of a publication is the largest number h such that at least h articles in that publication were cited at least h times each. For example, a publication with five articles cited by, respectively, 17, 9, 6, 3, and 2, has the h-index of 3.

The h-core of a publication is a set of top cited h articles from the publication. These are the articles that the h-index is based on. For example, the publication above has the h-core with three articles, those cited by 17, 9, and 6.

The h-median of a publication is the median of the citation counts in its h-core. For example, the h-median of the publication above is 9. The h-median is a measure of the distribution of citations to the articles in the h-core.

Finally, the h5-index, h5-core, and h5-median of a publication are, respectively, the h-index, h-core, and h-median of only those of its articles that were published in the last five complete calendar years.

We display the h5-index and the h5-median for each included publication. We also display an entire h5-core of its articles, along with their citation counts, so that you can see which articles contribute to the h5-index. And there's more! Click on the citation count for any article in the h5-core to see who cited it.