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Research Guides

Research Impact Metrics: Locating, Evaluating, and Using

Journal Metrics

Journal level metrics should only be used to make claims about the quality of a publication venue and not the research itself. Please see the DORA San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment and the Leiden Manifesto under the Responsible Use tab.

One of the most widely used journal level metrics is the Journal Impact Factor found in Journal Citation Reports. The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is the annual average (mean) number of citations per article in a given journal over the most recent 2-year period for almost all journals covered in the Web of Science Core Collection. There are many issues, controversies, and inappropriate uses of the JIF and related journal level metrics. See the Further Reading section below for details.

There is also the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR). The SJR expresses the average number of weighted citations received in a given year by the documents published in that journal for the three previous years using the Google PageRank algorithm and data from Elsevier's Scopus database. There is more information about the SJR at the SCImago website.

Beyond the JIF and SJR, one might consider a journal's acceptance rate as an indicator of a venue's quality. These metrics may be challenging to locate. Some publishers may list them on their journal's webpage or the journal editor might share them if contacted. One source for journal acceptance rates, especially in the social sciences and business, is Cabells Directory of Publishing Opportunities (now called Cabells Journalytics Academic).