Journal Metrics
A journal is considered to have a high impact if the articles it publishes are frequently cited. A number of resources are available that rank/score journals by their impact/influence.
- InCites Journal Citation Reports (JCR) - The best known resource for assessing journal impact since it has been around the longest. JCR allows authors to search for the Journal Impact Factor by journal title or to compare impact factors of journals within a subject category. JCR also reports the Eigenfactor Score of a journal as well as its Article Influence Score.
- Scopus - The Scopus database offers the CiteScore, which calculates citations for a specific journal within a 3-year citation window and compares rankings of journals within a subject discipline. Scopus also allows authors to identify the Source Normalized Impact Per Paper (SNIP), SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), and Impact Per Publication (IPP) of a journal. Click on Sources to access journal metrics within Scopus.
Google Scholar Metrics
Google Scholar Metrics provides top 100 lists of journals ranked by h5-index, i.e. five year h-index. Lists can be browsed by language or subject.
The impact factors/metrics within some disciplines will be higher than others, e.g. journals from medicine, biochemistry, cell biology are among the journals with the highest JCR impact factors while journals from economics, linguistics, and nursing are among those with lower impact factors. This is not a reflection of the quality of the journals in one discipline compared to another, but of the publication and citation practices of a discipline as well as the publications that are being analyzed by a particular metrics tool. When assessing the impact of a journal, no matter which metric you use, it makes sense to compare a journal to others within the same discipline or in other disciplines of relevance to the topic of your paper.
