One way that journals are evaluated is by their metrics. Metrics are quantitative measures designed to help evaluate research outputs. Some of these metrics, such as an h-index, apply to an author. Other metrics, such as journal acceptance rates and impact factor, relate to the journal itself. While these metrics should not be used alone to assess the quality of a journal, they are one option available to you.
Although the prestige of your scholarship and the place it's published in can be important, it's also important to maximize your research's impact in other ways. Check out our research guide linked below for more information about other ways you can share your work! This topic will be discussed more on the Increase Your Visibility tab on this guide.
One tool that you can use to find metrics for journals in your field is Scopus. Scopus provides tools for tracking citations and author publications, but it can also be used to find journal-level metrics such as # of citations per year and impact factor.
Be aware: not all journals are indexed in Scopus. Depending on your subject specialty, you may need to use a different tool or site to find informaton about your selected journal(s).
To retrieve a list of journals in your subject area, Click in the "enter subject area" box on the top of the page and either start typing or browse the fields listed and select the box(es) that correspond the most closely to your subject area:
Your results will automatically be grouped by CiteScore, but you can click on any modifier on the top of the results (% Cited, SJR, # of citations) to see how the rankings change based on the metric being applied.
Use the fields on the left side of the screen to narrow your results:
You can limit by Open Access journals, trade publications, or you can choose to only display publications that have published at least x amount of documents in the past year. This may be useful for weeding out journals that do not publish regularly, or which are no longer active.
When your search is complete, you should see a list of articles with various metrics you can sort by. What do these metrics mean?
While Scopus Sources does provide a few different methods for assessing a journal, there are other metrics and methods that might be of use to you as well. A few of these are provided in the links below.
A journal's Impact Factor (JIF) is a proprietary, journal-level metric owned by Clarivate (Web of Science). To have a JIF, a journal must be included in the Web of Science Core Collection.
The impact factor for a journal is an annual calculation that measures the average number of times in a given year that articles published the past 2 years in a specific journal have been cited during the year being analyzed.
Therefore, the IF for a journal in 2024 would be the number of times that articles published from 2022-2023 were cited during the 2024 calendar year.
In some disciplines, journals indexed by Web of Science are considered to be higher quality journals...in part, because Web of Science only covers "core" journals in each discipline. The higher the ranking, the more often they are being cited, according to their proprietary methods. Unfortunately, some interdisciplinary areas, newer fields/journals, and many journals published outside the U.S. are not covered well by Web of Science.
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