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Faculty Scholarly Publishing

Faculty are invited to use this guide for information regarding scholarly publishing, open access, bibliometrics, and APC information. E. H. Butler Library Subscribes to many resources that can assist faculty with scholarship endeavors.

Journal Rankings & Impact

Journal & Author Metrics

ornamental image

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)

ornamental image of a typewriter

(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

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 Video Tutorial 

SCImago Ranking Selected Readings 

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 

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:

screenshot of web of science showing an article record and highlighting the title of the journal  

Click on the Journal to find the JCI score: 

screen shot of Web of Science journal record with the Journal Citation Indicator listed at the bottom

Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) Selected Readings

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 Journal Score Selected Readings

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.

Tutorial on CWTS Journal Indicators 

CWTS Journal Indicators Selected Readings

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 Np  papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np − 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 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-indexh5-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.

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