They are measures used to evaluate the quality of a journal.
Commonly used metrics include:
These can be Inclusion on the Excellence in Research in Australia (ERA) or other curated lists, where it is indexed, peer review status, citation metrics, subject rankings and acceptance rates. For more help use the:
Journal metrics can be used in grant applications, academic promotion and as a way to identify potential journals to publish in.
Impact factors are found in Journal Citation Reports (JCR), a Clarivate database. This database allows you to determine the relative importance of journals within their subject categories.
Impact factors can be used to:
Not all journals have impact factors, they must be indexed in Web of Science Core Collection.
To state that the journal of Internet and Higher Education has an impact factor of 7.178 is not meaningful. Rather, the impact factor of a journal should be compared to the impact factors for other journals within the same subject category.
It is more useful to say:
"This journal is in Quartile 1, 5/264 for Education & Educational Research - Journal Citation Reports (2019)."
Scopus provides the following metrics to compare journals
Name of the measure | Definition |
Scimago journal & country rank (SJR) | Defined as the average number of weighted citations received in the selected year by the documents published in the selected journal in the three previous years. It is a measure of prestige. |
CiteScore | Based on the number of citations to documents by a journal over four years, divided by the number of the same document types indexed in Scopus and published in those same four years. |
Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) | Shows the ratio of a source's average citation count per paper and the citation potential of its subject field. |
The above definitions are adapted from:
To find the CiteScore, SNIP and other measures:
Check grant guidelines carefully as some may stipulate that using journal metrics is not appropriate. For example the National Health and Medical Research Council investigator grants do not allow the use of journal metrics.