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Indicators of Publication Research Impact: Journal Metrics

Metrics to help you demonstrate the scholarly impact of articles, authors, and journals

Journal Metrics

How significant are the journals in which you've been publishing your articles?

Impact Factor and Immediacy Index (Web of Science data)

College of Charleston subscribes to Journal Citation Reports (JCR) which provides long-established indicators of journal prestige, based upon the highly-selective set of journals indexed in Web of Science.

JCR metrics available include:

  • Journal Citation Indicator – a supplement to the Journal Impact Factor designed to account for variations in citation patterns across disciplines, making it valid for interdisciplinary comparison. Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) uses publications from the previous three years and their citations during that period. JCI is calculated as the mean of the preceding three years' Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) metric (See the White Paper for an in-depth description of JCI). CNCI is also a new metric that is calculated annually, "by dividing the actual count of citing items by the expected citation rate for documents with the same document type, year of publication and subject area." (see InCites Help for the full technical description of CNCI)

    To interpret JCI, a value of 1.0 is a globally mean citation rate across disciplines, with values higher than 1.0 demonstrating a higher than average citation rate and values lower than 1.0 demonstrating a lower than average citation rate.
     
  • Journal Impact Factor – a measure of the frequency with which the "average article" in a particular journal has been cited during a two-year period
  • Five-year Journal Impact Factor – a measure of the frequency with which the "average article" in a journal has been cited during a five-year period
  • Immediacy Index – indicates how quickly articles in a journal tend to be cited by analyzing citation data for a single year
  • Journal rankings by each of the above metrics

Access JCR at:

The following brief video provides an introduction to the platform and two key metrics:

Comparing two key indices: Journal Impact Factor and Journal Citation Indicator

Cabell's

Cabell's Scholarly Analytics (AKA Cabell's Journal Whitelist) is a subscription resource provided by the College and which provides information about journals including:

  • Peer Review Critera
  • Acceptance Rate
  • Frequency of Publication

Access Cabell's at:

CiteScore and Source Normalized Impact per Paper (Scopus data)

CiteScore Metrics, a recent initiative of Elsevier publishing, are obtained from data within the Scopus database, which indexes a greater variety of journals than Web of Science. They also include a broader variety of material types.

CiteScore metrics include:

  • CiteScore – much like a three-year Journal Impact Factor (see CiteScore methodology)
  • Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) – measures contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field, using Scopus data (see a description of SNIP)
  • Scimago Journal Rank (SJR) – a size-independent indicator of scientific journal prestige (see a description of SJR). SJR can be accessed independently of CiteScore at https://www.scimagojr.com/
  • Journal rankings by each of the above metrics