Journal impact measurements reflect the importance of a particular journal in a field and take into account the number of articles published per year and the number of citations to articles published in that journal.
Journal metrics tell you nothing about the impact of the author or particular article, and they should not be used as a measure of a researcher's impact. They should not even be the sole factor when evaluating the quality of the journal. In addition, journal metrics tend to vary across fields, with biomedical and related sciences skewing higher. In addition, researchers should be aware that journal metrics for 2022 (and probably 2023) are inflated due to Covid-19. You may wish to check 5 year averages as well.
More information about journal metrics here.
Journal Citation Reports provides total cites, Journal Impact Factor, 5-Year Impact Factor, Immediacy Index, Number of Articles, Eigenfactor Score, and Article Influence Score.
It can also be accessed through Web of Science. Click on the menu on the upper right hand portion of the screen and select "Journal Citation Reports" as shown below.
This resource shows the Journal Impact Factor, a way to measure the relative impact of a particular journal within its field, based on the average number of times an article published will be cited in the near future. JIF is the most widely used journal level metric. It is calculated like this:
It also displays the Eigenfactor: The value of the Eigenfactor is similar to the Journal Impact Factor or the 5-year Journal Impact Factor. Unlike those, the Eigenfactor assigns weight or value to each earned citation, according to the citedness of the citing journal. Consider two journals: Journal A is highly cited; Journal B is poorly cited. Cites coming from Journal A are given greater weight when the Eigenfactors for journals B-Z are being calculated and cites from Journal B are given less weight when calculating Eigenfactors for journals A & C-Z. (from Clarivate)
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). It also provides rankings by journal country of origin and numerous visual representations of journal impact data.
Google Scholar Metrics allows authors to view journal rankings and ratings by various h-indeces. Journal ranking can be viewed for the top 100 publications in 9 different languages, or by broad subject research areas and numerous subcategories. Scholar Metrics uses those articles published between 2009 and 2013 and citation from all articles indexed in Google Scholar.
If you would like help creating metrics reports for a researcher, lab group or unit, have questions about metrics or accessing the tools in this guide, or would like guidance on metrics not discussed in this guide, please contact:
Lena Bohman, Data Services and Research Impact Librarian, lena.g.bohman@hofstra.edu
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