What is Journal Impact Factor?
Journal Impact Factor is frequently used as a proxy for the importance of a journal to its field. Eigenfactor and SCImago Journal & Country Rank are free tools for finding the impact of a journal or groups of journals.
Eigenfactor Metrics
Eigenfactor ranks and maps scientific knowledge:
- Ranks journals similar to Google ranking of websites. It uses the structure of the entire network (instead of purely local citation information) to evaluate the importance of each journal. Journals are rated according to the number of incoming citations, with citations from highly-ranked journals weighted to make a larger contribution to the Eigenfactor than those from poorly-ranked journals.
- Eigenfactor Metrics consists of the Eigenfactor score and the Article Influence score.
- Eigenfactor score: a measure of the overall value provided by all of the articles published in a given journal in a year.
- Article Influence score: a measure of a journal's prestige based on per article citations and comparable to Impact Factor.
- Measures journal price as well as citation influence. The Cost-Effectiveness Search orders journals by a measure of the value of the dollar they provide.
- Ranks scholarly journals as well as newspapers, theses, popular magazines, etc.
- Adjusts for citation differences across disciplines, allowing for better comparison across research areas.
- Calculations are based on the citations received over a 5-year period vs. 2 years in JCR.
- Available free of charge on the web. [eigenfactor.org, 2009]
How to find the Eigenfactor:
- Go to eigenfactor.org
- Search for a single journal name or choose a subject category.
- Select a year.
- Click Search.
Note: advanced search (searches by Thomson JCR subject categories, publisher, and other fields) is also available.
SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR)
SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) is free source that includes the journals and country-scientific indicators developed from Elsevier's Scopus database. It ranks journals and compares journal citation among countries. Journals are assigned to major thematic categories as well as to specific subject categories according to Scopus Classification.
The SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) indicator expresses the average number of weighted citations received in the selected year by the documents published in the selected journal in the three previous years.
How to find journal rankings in SJR:
- Go to SJR and click on Journal Rankings.
- Select Subject Area, e.g., Nursing.
- Select Subject Category, e.g., Maternity and Midwifery.
- Select other categories as needed and click Refresh.
