Skip to Main Content

Research Impact

Guide about how to track your scholarly and research impact.

Scopus Journal Metrics

Scopus Journal Metrics apply to over 20,000 journals, proceedings, and book series.  They are refreshed once per year and provide multidimensional insights into journal performance.  (Journal Metrics)  The table below lists some of the metrics considered.

Metric Description
SJR SCImago Journal Rank. Weighted by journal prestige.  Subject field, quality, and reputation of the journal have a direct effect on the value of a citation.  Normalizes for differences in citation between subject fields.  Four years of data needed to calculate.  
IPP Impact per Publication by year.  Compare ratio of citations per article published in a journal.  Uses citation window of three years.
SNIP Source normalized impact per paper per year.  Measures a source's contextual impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field.
Citations Total number of citations received by a journal in the year, considering all documents
Documents Total number of documents published in a journal in the year

Table reproduced from Scopus

Journal Impact Factor

The journal impact factor measures the average number of citations to recent articles published in that journal each year.

For your consideration

Editors’ JIF-boosting stratagems – Which are appropriate and which not? 

Editorial from Research Policy cautioning the ways in which researchers and editors can game the system to increase impact metrics.

Eigenfactor

Eigenfactor (created by University of Washington scientists, Thomson Reuters)

Eigenfactor logo: a human brain outline in orange with a small grey spaceship passing under it to the right

The Eigenfactor score of a journal is an estimate of the percentage of time that library users spend with that journal. Borrowing methods from network theory, eigenfactor.org ranks the influence of journals much as Google’s PageRank algorithm ranks the influence of web pages. By this approach, journals are considered to be influential if they are cited often by other influential journals.

Journal Acceptance Rates