Journal Metrics are usually taken into account when choosing where to submit your manuscript. You may want to identify top journals in a particular discipline, or have two or three titles in mind and would like to identify the most impactful in terms of visibility. Journal metrics should not be used as a proxy for an individual's research impact, there are plenty of zero-cited articles in the world's top journals. Also, journal metrics should not be used in isolation. Your best chance of being cited is by publishing in the venue you know will be read by your peers and of course making your work open access.
There are a number of journal metrics to choose from. For example, the "Journal Impact Factor". This was the original journal metric and has become so popular it has become the ubiquitous term for journal metrics. It is however, just one of many. Each has a specific formula for calculating the ranking, has a specific rolling timeframe and each is based on a finite bibliographic dataset (e.g. Scopus or Web of Science) so again, your journal may not be ranked. The most popular journal ranking systems are outlined below.
Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is produced by Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters). JCR is a subscription-based product based on data from the Web of Science. JCR is the original journal ranking tool, first developed in the 1950s, and it is the current market leader for journal rankings.
JCR allows you to search for individual journals or to compare groups of journals by subject category. JCR provides a range of metrics for each journal, covering impact over 2 and 5 years, how quickly things get cited, if citing continues over a long period of time and others. JCR also provides the eigenfactor metrics.
Key metric: Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
The journal impact factor is the average number of citations received in a year by articles published in a journal in the previous two years. e.g. a journal’s JIF for the year 2015 is calculated as follows:
Source: MyRI
SCImago is a freely available web resource available at http://www.scimagojr.com This uses Scopus data to provide metrics and statistical data for journals. The main metrics have now also been included within the subscription Scopus product if you have access to that
As well as a Journal Rank Indicator (SJR) , SCImago provides a number of other metrics and statistics for journals and it allows you to search for journals individually or comparatively by discipline and sub-discipline.
Key metric: SCImago Journal Rank Indicator (SJR)
The SJR is much like the Journal Impact Factor in principle. However it goes a step further by mimicking the Google PageRank algorithm. As such it assigns higher value/weight to citations from more prestigious journals. The SJR covers a three year citation window e.g. a journal’s SJR for 2015:
Source: MyRI
Scopus Sources
There are two metrics based on the Scopus dataset...
Key metric- CiteScore
CiteScore metrics are produced by Scopus (Elsevier) and are freely available at http://journalmetrics.scopus.com. A journal's CiteScore represents the average number of citations received in a year by articles published in the previous three years e.g. a journal’s CiteScore for 2015 is:
Key metric- SNIP Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)
Created by Professor Henk Moed at CTWS, University of Leiden, Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) measures contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field. This is designed to allow comparison across research areas, not possible with most metrics SNIP is freely available at http://www.journalindicators.com/
Google Scholar Journal Metrics
Google Scholar Metrics are based on the Google Scholar Index. You can browse the Top 100 publications in broad subject areas (in several languages) or more specific sub-categories (English only) based on the h5-index and the h5-median
Key Metrics - h5-index and h-5 median
These are the h-index and h-median of its articles that were published in the last five complete calendar years.
It also lists the h-core (articles the h-index is based on), all citations for each h-core article articles for each journal and it links directly to articles.
Limitations include: the exclusion of some journals that are indexed in Google Scholar; some manually selected resources (such as repositories or working papers) are treated as journals; search options are limited.
