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Introduction

Journal Impact measures the average number of articles published and the number of citations the articles received in that journal. It can be used to identify significant journals in a field and it may support publication decisions. Most commonly used metric for measuring a journal is the Impact Factor which is published by Journal Citation Reports (JCR) every year (based on Web of Science data).

Scopus also provides metrics for journal evaluation which include SJRSNIP and CiteScore. CiteScore calculates the average number of citations given in a certain year to the publications that appeared in a journal in the three preceding years. It replaces the IPP (Impact Per Paper) that used to be available in Scopus.

Google Scholar Metrics measures the h-index for a journal over the past 5 years (h5-index). It uses data collected from Google Scholar.
 

View details on different metrics by clicking on the links below.

Access from InCites Journal Citation Reports Access from Scopus Access Google Scholar Metrics

Remarks on using Journal Metrics to measure Journal Impact

Not all journals can be measured by journal metrics. Only journals indexed by the citation databases have corresponding journal metrics. 

For example, SJR, SNIP and CiteScore of a journal are available when the title is indexed in Scopus. Besides, the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is available to all Web of Science Core Collection journals, including those indexed in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) and Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI).


Journal metrics measure the influence and research impact of journals. These measures are predominately based on citation counts.

Journal metrics can only be used to measure the research impact of journals and should not be used to measure an author's research influence.