Journal metrics are used to quantify the research impact of a journal in scholarly publishing.
Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the most well-known journal metric, which is published in Journal Citation Reports by Clarivate Analytics, previously known as The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Other databases that provide journal metrics include Scopus and Google Scholars.
Journal Citation Reports, Scopus, and Google Scholars determine their journal metrics from the list of publications indexed in their collections. These resources use different formulas to rank journal performance, therefore the ranking of a publication may vary between different databases. This guide will show you how to find journal metrics in the Journal Citation Reports, Scopus, and Google Scholars and introduce some popular journal metrics.
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When you look for appropriate journals to publish your article, journal metrics can be used as one of the criteria in evaluating journal performance. Journal Citation Reports, Scopus, and Google Scholars also provide you a journal list of different subject categories for comparison and ranking purposes. |
However, journal metrics should be used with caution. They are calculated based on the recent citations received by a journal, but citations received by individual articles published by the same journal can be varied substantially. Moreover, citation behavior is disciplinary dependent, for example, the publication rate of Science and Medicine is much faster than Arts and Humanities. It is important to review a journal’s aims and scope together with its journal metrics in deciding which journal is a good match for your manuscript.
