Skip to Main Content
MCPHS Library Logo

Impact Metrics

Journal Rankings

Journal rankings assess a journal's quality using citation data, as journals that are cited more often are generally considered more prestigious. They were originally developed for librarians to help them develop their collections. They are also useful for journal editors, to compare the performance of their journal, and researchers, to help decide to which journals they should submit articles.

CiteScore (Scopus)

CiteScore presents a journal's relative ranking within its subject area. A journal's CiteScore number and percentile are calculated using a ratio of the citations of its documents from one year to the total number of documents published over the previous three years. This calculation includes front matter, such as letters to the editor and editorials, which can impact the CiteScore for journals with more front matter than average, as these documents are generally not cited.

SCImago Journal Ranking (SJR)

SJR is a publicly available portal. It calculates its rankings in a similar fashion to CiteScore, taking the average number of citations a journal's documents received in a year and dividing it by the number of documents the journal published over the previous three years. What makes SJR unique, however, is that it weighs citation differently depending on the prestige of the journal in which the citation occurs, with higher value going to more prestigious journals. 

SNIP

SNIP also provides a unique measure of the impact of a specific journal by basing its calculations on the ratio of citations per paper in a journal to the potential number of citations within the journal's field. This measure contextual citation impact by weighing citations based on the total number of citations within a given subject field, making it useful for comparing the citation impact of sources in different subject fields.

Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

JIF is the average number of times articles from a particular journal published in the past two years have been cited in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) year.

Journal Metrics on Scopus

Journal Metrics on Google Scholar

Connect with the MCPHS Libraries via Social Media: Instagram