What is CiteScore?

CiteScore is a new standard that gives a more comprehensive, transparent and current view of a journal’s impact that will help you guide your journal more effectively in the future.

ٌWhat is CiteScore?

Elsevier launched a new product, Journal Metrics, on December 5, 2016. What stands out in this product is a new factor called CiteScore that Elsevier has provided and is a rival to the Thomson Reuters Impact Factor. The CiteScore has been introduced to complement other Scopus indicators, including SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) and SJR (SCImago Journal Rank), which provide a comprehensive insights into the citation impact of more than 22,220 titles.

CiteScore vs. Impact Factor

• CiteScore is actually a Scopus impact factor while Impact Factor is based on Web of Science data
• CiteScore uses a 3-year window (for publications), while Impact Factor adopts a 2-year window.
• CiteScore includes all document types indexed by Scopus, i.e. articles, reviews, letters, notes, editorials, conference papers, etc. while Impact Factor only includes “citable documents” which are articles and reviews.

CiteScore Advantages

If you would like to choose between the two, than please consider this; usually a longer publications’ window indicates more stability (less fluctuations), but the impact factor which is based on two-year window relies on a very selective quality data. A third way could be to rank the journals by both methods and compare the results.

Researchers, publishers, information professionals, institutional leaders, funders and others in academia can use CiteScore metrics to gain greater insight into journal citation impact.

As parts of a multi-dimensional basket of metrics, CiteScore metrics help boost confidence in decision making.

CiteScore metrics can help to:

• Reveal titles to create reading lists, as well as acquire evidence about title relevance and performance in a field
• Analyze the citation impact of a library’s collection, where an output is published, and publication/portfolio strategies
• Validate tenure, promotion and publishing decisions

CiteScore Calculation

CiteScore is a metric for measuring journal impact in Scopus. The calculation of CiteScore for the current year is based on the number of citations received by a journal in that year for the documents published in the journal in the past three years, divided by the documents indexed in Scopus published in those three years.

This comprehensive, current and open metric for journal citation impact (introduced in December 2016) is available in a fee layer of Scopus.com.  It includes a yearly release and monthly CiteScore tracker updates.

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