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Journal Rankings

Journal rankings are metrics that provide information on how a journal performs compared to others in its discipline. They are often based on impact factors, which measure the average number of citations received by a journal's articles over the previous two years. Common journal ranking tools include Journal Citation Reports, SCImago, and Eigenfactor. These tools use metrics like impact factor, SCImago Journal Rank, and Eigenfactor to rank journals. However, journal rankings are not appropriate for all disciplines, especially those in arts and humanities that publish more in books than journals.

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148 views2 pages

Journal Rankings

Journal rankings are metrics that provide information on how a journal performs compared to others in its discipline. They are often based on impact factors, which measure the average number of citations received by a journal's articles over the previous two years. Common journal ranking tools include Journal Citation Reports, SCImago, and Eigenfactor. These tools use metrics like impact factor, SCImago Journal Rank, and Eigenfactor to rank journals. However, journal rankings are not appropriate for all disciplines, especially those in arts and humanities that publish more in books than journals.

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Asep Deden Rahmat S
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opus.bath.ac.

uk Guide to journal rankings


1. What are journal rankings? Journal rankings are metrics that provide information on how a journal performs in comparison with other journals in the same discipline. Articles in high impact journals are more likely to be cited. Good citation counts are often considered to be important in research or university assessment tables. Before choosing where to submit their research papers, authors often consult journal rankings to find out which journals have more impact and influence. 2. Which rankings to use? Type of journal o Scholarly, professional, popular/trade o Peer-reviewed articles? Style of writing? Journal aims and scope o Usually found on the journal website Market-share o Intended audience; publication longevity; how many articles per year are published Indexing o Widely indexed articles are more easily found. Indices include Web of Science, IBSS, Scopus, Compendex, etc. High-status editorial board Well-cited articles Influential Circulation count

Many subject areas rank journals based on their impact factor or similar metric. These are usually obtained from the journal ranking tools available see section 3 below.

But journal rankings are not appropriate for some subject areas. Arts and humanities subjects tend to publish more in books, so journal citations are less meaningful here. Some disciplines publish more in conference proceedings, and these are not well covered by the rankings databases. So other ways of assessing journals have to be found. Some subject areas have lists of top journals maintained by their professional body, e.g. the ABS Journal Lists for Management. Alternative lists of top journals, e.g. the Excellence in Research Australia initiatives journal list (http://www.arc.gov.au/era/), can prove useful to authors from disciplines poorly served by journal rankings. Authors from disciplines that dont have journals with impact factors can consider the following characteristics when choosing where to publish.

Opus
3. Journal Ranking Tools The tools listed below are often used when ranking journals. 3.1 Journal Citation Reports (JCR) JR is the original journal ranking tool, first developed in the 1950s, and is the current market leader for journal rankings. It forms part of the subscription-based ISI suite of products known as Web of Knowledge (Web of Science is also part of this suite). 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 two and five years, immediacy of citing, if citing continues over time etc. JCR also provides Eigenfactor metrics. Key metric: Journal Impact Factor (JIF). A journals JIF for a given year is the average number of citations received in that year by articles published in the journal in the previous two years.

3.2 SCImago A free web resource available from http://www.scimagojr.com/ SCImago uses data from Elseviers Scopus database to provide journal metrics and statistical data. You can search for individual journals or compare journals by discipline and sub-discipline. Key metric: SCImago Journal Rank Indicator (SJR). The SJR is much like the JIF in principle. However it goes a step further in that citations from highly ranked journals are given more weight than others. The SJR takes into account citations from the previous 3 years (whereas the JIF looks at the past 2 years). 3.3 Eigenfactor http://eigenfactor.org is a free web resource that provides metrics for journals using data from ISIs JCR. As well as the Eigenfactor score, it also provides the Article Influence score, which is more directly comparable with the JCR JIF. Key metric: Eigenfactor. As with SCImagos SJR, the developers of the Eigenfactor use a similar method to rank journals i.e. the Eigenfactor of a journal is based on the citations it receives from other journals, and citations from highly ranked journals are given more weight than others. The Eigenfactor score also takes into account other variables like the disciplinary relationships between citing and cited journals. It is based on a five year citation window, and is a measure of the overall impact of a journal, not of each individual article. 3.4 Scopus Journal Analyzer Scopus have enhanced their Journal Analyzer product in 2009/2010, so that the SJR calculation from SCImago is now included in the Journal Analyzer.

Key metric: Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP). SNIP measures contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field. The impact of a single citation is given higher value in subject areas where citations are less likely, and vice versa. 4. Issues and limitations Different ranking tools use different metrics and have different journal coverage. Trying several tools is advisable. No current ranking tools adequately categorise multi-disciplinary journals. The use of rankings is not advisable for some disciplines (e.g. arts).

For more information about journal rankings and metrics, see: Journal M3trics: http://www.journalmetrics.com/ MyRI Bibliometrics: An Introduction: http://www.ndlr.ie/myri/

Alternatively contact your Subject Librarian, or the Opus team in the Library.

Kara Jones For help, contact: Katy Jordan Research Publications Librarian Ext. 4897
Katie Evans Repository Support Librarian Ext. 5114

email: [email protected]

10.1016/j.gmod.2006.05.003

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