Increase Your Scholarly Impact

Journal metrics represent the importance of a journal in a discipline based on citations to the journal as a whole over a period of time. The use of journal metrics to evaluate faculty performance has pros and cons, especially depending on your discipline. Note the Subject Coverage in the boxes below.

Major journal metrics currently available, along with their definitions, are:

• Journal Impact Factor (JIF) from Journal Citation Reports (JCR)
• Journal Quartiles and JIF Percentiles from JCR  
• SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) from the SCImago Journal and Country Rank (SCImago)
• Journal h-index from SCImago
• Journal h-indices from Google Scholar
• CiteScore metrics and Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), free metrics from Scopus

Remember that journal metrics are based on differing citation counts and may be calculated differently from one resource to the next. This means, for example, that the journal h-indices from Google Scholar and SCImago are not interchangeable or comparable. See the rest of this page for details on how to find the various journal metrics.

Enter the publicly available SCImago Journal and Country Rank (SCImago). Watch this short video on how to locate the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) for a title, SJR quartiles, and the h-index:

• "Searching the SCImago Journal Ranking Database" (4:20 minutes)

SCImago is developed from the information in the Scopus database from Elsevier. Therefore, it has the same limitations as Scopus - see the details in the box above.

Enter the publicly available Google Scholar on the Metrics page. Watch this short video that demonstrates how to find the h-indices for journals:

• "Google Scholar Metrics" (1:04 minute video)

Remember these points about Google Scholar:

• Subject coverage. Best coverage of humanities, and also strong in social sciences and STEM disciplines.
• Limitation. Google does not provide a list of the journals it tracks.