What are Journal Metrics?
The Metrics Toolkit is a resource for researchers and evaluators that provides guidance for demonstrating and evaluating claims of research impact. With the Toolkit you can quickly understand what a metric means, how it is calculated, and if it’s good match for your impact question.
Journal Impact Factor (JIF) from Journal Citation Reports
Journal Impact Factor (JIF) identifies the frequency with which an average article from a journal is cited in a particular year. This is calculated by deriving the ratio between the total number of citations garnered by documents and the total number of citable documents in a journal. The time period of calculation over a two year period. Only journals that are indexed in Web of Science Core Collection will have a JIF value in Journal Citation Reports JCR
For example, QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS had an impact factor of 11.775 in 2018. |
(Source : JCR, 2019)
5 year Impact Factor
CiteScore from 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.
For example, the 2023 CiteScore counts the citations received in 2020-2023 to articles, reviews, conference papers, book chapters, and data papers published in 2020-2023, and divides this by the number of these documents published in 2020-2023.
For example The Lancet had a CiteScore of 148.1 in year 2023 |
SJR from SCImago Journal Rank
Eigenfactor Score
Eigenfactor 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. However, unlike the Impact Factor, the Eigenfactor Score:
Google Scholar metrics
Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)
Facts about journal metrics
Individual articles should never be judged solely on the Impact Factor or other metrics for the journal in which an article is published.