Scholarly Metrics

Journal-level indicators are designed to measure the impact, prestige, or influence of a given journal title. The citation ratios common to journal metrics are often used as a kind of shorthand that helps scholars decide where to submit an article for publication or to make decisions in libraries about what journal subscriptions to obtain, retain, or cancel. 

CAVEATS:

There are a number of reasons why a journal-level indicator, such as JIF, Eigenfactor, SJR, SNIP, CiteScore, etc., is not appropriate for evaluating the work of an individual scholar: 

• Most journal-level indicators are predicated on taking the mean number of citations per article for an entire journal. Instead, the citations in an entire journal do not follow a normal distribution (i.e., the bell curve). Instead a small percentage of articles receive the majority of citations, while the majority of articles go uncited. 
• Citations to articles drive journal impact scores, not vice versa. Therefore, publishing in a high-impact journal does not guarantee a greater likelihood of being cited. 
• High-quality articles can be published in journals that have no impact score, for example, journals covering emerging fields or journals providing deep coverage of a subspecialty. 

Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 

This resource below provides total cites, Journal Impact Factor,  5-Year Impact Factor, Immediacy Index, Number of Articles, Eigenfactor Score, and Article Influence Score. It is generally not advised to compare Impact Factors and Immediacy Index scores between journals of different subject categories because differing citation and publication rates between disciplines are not normalized. See: Master Journal List Indexed in Web of Science.

​Scopus Sources

This resource provides free access to journal-level metrics used in Elsevier's Scopus database, and includes CiteScore and Percentile ranking, Source Normalized Impact Per Paper (SNIP), Citation Count,  Number of Articles Published, and Scimago Journal Rank (SJR).