Scholarly Communications

• Journal-level metrics are all based off on number of citations to their articles, which are based off of datasets from citation-tracking tools such as Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar.
• These metrics are used as proxies for the prestige and disciplinary importance of a journal. 
• Journal-level metrics can be used to identify where to try to publish an article in order to maximize attention and likely citation. 
• Journal-level metrics are often used in tenure, promotion, and evaluation to demonstrate the prestige of where the researcher is published. 
• Issues with some journal-level metrics include difficulties in comparing between disciplines, differentiating between quantity and quality of citations, and dealing with incentives for journals to encourage authors to self-cite more articles in their journal to inflate the metrics. 

Types of Journal Metrics

• Acceptance rates
• Impact Factor
• CiteScore
• SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)
• H-index

• Acceptance rates are the percentage of submissions that actually get published in a journal. Low rates are used as a proxy of prestige as the journal is more difficult to get published in. 
• Different journals will use varying method for measuring their acceptance rate. 
• University of Memphis does not have a source for checking acceptance rates.
• To find acceptance rates, you might try to 
  • Check the journal's website, especially on About pages and pages about publishing with the journals.
  • Contact the journal's editor. 

• Journal Impact Factor (IF) is a measure of how often the average article from a particular journal is cited. The logic is that the more often the average article is cited, the more impactful the journal is. 
• IF is tracked using citation data from Clarivate's Web of Science platform.
• There are multiple versions of IF along with associated metrics built on it: 
  • 2-Year Impact Factor: the average number of times an article from the journal is cited over a 2-year period. The original IF measure.
  • 5-Year Impact Factor: the average number of times an article from the journal is cited over a 5-year period.
  • Immediacy Index: the average number of times an article from the journal is cited in the year it is published. 
  • Eigenfactor Score: calculated from article citations over a 5-year period, but it adjusts the score to value citations from other highly-cited journals more. Citations from articles in the same journal are removed to prevent bias towards journal self-citation. 
  • Cited Half-Life: average age of articles cited in that journal. The lower the number, the more citations are being made to more current articles in the journal. 
  • Article Influence Score: a way of measuring how influential a journal's articles are over their first five years since publication. Calculated based off the Eigenfactor Score: (Eigenfactor Score * 0.01) / # articles in the journal. 
• IF can be found through the Web of Science and Journal Citation Reports databases.
  • The University of Memphis does not have a subscription to either database and instead subscribes to its competitor Scopus.
  • However, many journals do include their IF on their websites, often on the main page or an about page. 
  • You can also find Eigenfactor and Article Influence Scores freely available through the Eigenfactor Project.

• CiteScore is Elsevier's equivalent to Journal Impact Factor built on citation data from its Scopus database. 
• CiteScore measures the average citations to an article in a journal over a full 3-year period. So the 2021 CiteScore covers 2018-2021. 
  • Scopus will also provide a tracking CiteScore for the current year that is updated monthly. So the 2023 CiteScore Tracker covers 2020 to the current month in 2023. 
  • CiteScore will also provide a journal's rank and percentile by discipline.  
• Scopus also provides two other metrics built from its data. 
  • SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)
  • Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP): compares the actual citations received compared to the expected citations expected based on the journal's discipline. 

• SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) is an impact measure built from Scopus data that takes the number of citations over a 3-year period and weighs them based on the citing journal, similar to the Eigenfactor Score.
• Based on their SJR, each journal is given ranks based on Scopus-defined disciplines and subdisciplines and places into quartiles. 
• Each journal also has an h-index.
• SJR provides a number of ways to narrow down results for comparison. 
  • Journals can be limited to those that are Open Access, those in the SciELO Open Access network, and those indexed in Web of Science. 
  • You can look at journals by discipline and subdiscipline. 
  • You can also limit results by geographic region. 
  • Besides journal articles, SJR ranks book series, conference proceedings, and trade journals and lets you limit your results to any of these formats. 
• Use the JSR help documentation to get started with identifying journal ranks. 

• The h-index was originally designed as an author-level metric that has been adapted for journals.
• The h-index is measured as the highest number of articles (h) published by a journal that have been cited at least (h) times. 
  • So an h-index of 50 means that a journal has 50 articles that have been cited at least 50 times. 
  • A higher number is more valuable as it shows more articles with more citations.
• H-indexes can be limited by time period (hx-index) where x is a year range.
  • So an h5-index measures highest number of articles (h) published by a journal that have been cited at least (h) times over the last 5 years. 
• Google Scholar uses its own citation data to rank journals by h5-index. 
  • You can limit publications based on journal category and subcategory as well as by journal language. 
  • Google Scholar also provides the h5-median, which is the median number of citations for the articles included in the h5-index. 
  • Clicking the h-index number will bring up all the articles included in the h5-index analysis and their citations.