“Using the Impact Factor alone to judge a journal is like using weight alone to judge a person’s health.”
Source: The Joint Committee on Quantitative Assessment of Research: “Citation Statistics”, a report from the International Mathematical Union
“There is no single ‘best’ indicator that could accommodate all facets of the new reality of Journal Metrics.”
Source: Wolfgang Glänzel, Centre for R&D Monitoring, ECOOM Leuven, Belgium
So, Why do we need journal analytics?
• Where to publish for maximum visibility
• Analyze and compare journal information to others in the same field
• Track how research is received by others
• Funding applications may require journal metrics
• The relative importance of a journal may help you decide in which journal to publish your research
To determine the level of your Journal, many databases that can help:
Journal Impact factor – a metric that reflects the impact of a journal over a number of years - use the database ‘Journal Citation Reports’ (Web of Science)
Journal Ranking metrics – metrics that reflects the prestige value of a journal relative to discipline - use ‘SCImago’ (Scopus SNIP & SJR.) or ‘Journal Citation Reports’
Comparison of Journals – use ‘Journal Citation Reports’ or ‘SCImago’
Citations per paper – use Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar
All of the above methods are depending of Journal Impact Factor (JIF), now, I will present how this will be calculated.
How the Journal Impact Factor is calculated
Calculation:
The journal impact factor (JIF) calculation is based over three years.
For example the 2014 JIF of the journal “Nature” in this example is 41.456
How to check you Journal Impact Factor and H-Idex
There are many websites can help you in analyzing Journal Impact Factor, the most very common web-application is:
or
So, the website will give you the information about SJR indicator and H-Idex, which mean, if your Journal is listed under SJR or H-Idex, means the Journal is indexed by Scopus which mean a very good Journal to use or to publish in.
•SJR - measures the journals impact, influence or prestige. It expresses the average number of weighted citations received in the selected year by the documents published in the journal in the three previous years.
•H-Index – the journal’s number of articles (h) which have received at least h citations over the whole period.
The following youtube video will explain how to use http://www.scimagojr.com:
So, Finally, we can summarized the whole story by the following diagram:
I would like to thanks Dr. Sultan Muhaya Al-Daihani from Kuwait University (College of Social Science), he provided me a lot of information for Journal Ranking Metrics.