Evaluating Journals By Journal Metrics 2

Choosing reliable sources relying on the numbers given by journal metrics when doing research is an important requirement for all researchers.

Publishing articles in high-quality and prestigious journals not only enhances the author’s credibility but also increases the chances of being reached and accessed for his/her articles among others, thereby increasing the number of citations to the article. There are different criteria for selecting a valid and prestigious journal.

In the previous blog post, we discussed the most important journal metrics which are bibliometric indicators focusing on measuring the impact of scholarly journals to allow scholars and researchers to measure, compare, and often rank research and scholarly publications.

Journal Metrics Types

• Impact Factor: calculated by ISI
• IPP: calculated by Scopus
• SNIP: calculated by Scopus
• SJR: calculated by Scopus
• JIF: calculated by ISI

In the previous blog post, we discussed three journal metrics, i.e. Impact Factor,  SNIP and IPP; here, in the present post, we will clarify the other two, SJR and JIF.

SJR

SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) is a research group from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), University of Granada, Extremadura, Carlos III (Madrid) and Alcalá de Henares; it uses Google PageRank ™ algorithm to extract various index information from the Scopus database and to rank the journals in terms of scientific credibility.

This ranking system is one of the newest and most comprehensive research ranking methods of universities and research institutes in the world. In the SCImago ranking, the scientific influence of scholarly journals is measured. SJR addresses both the number of citations to the journal and the importance of the journal in which the citations are published.

In other words, different citations have different values. The importance and prestige of the journal where citations come from have a direct relation with the prestige of the journal that receives those citations.

A journal’s SJR is a numeric value indicating the average number of weighted citations received during a selected year per document published in that journal during the previous three years. Higher SJR values are meant to indicate greater journal prestige.

SCImago Journal Rank (SJR):

• Reviews articles over a three-year period, which is higher than other ratings
• Considers citations in terms of validity, which in turn, reduces the likelihood of fraud and cheating, and makes more sense because not all citations are of equal value.
• The database used by the SCImago rating system is more comprehensive than other rating indices.

JIF

In the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), each journal has an ID as the journal number. These numbers are arranged in alphabetical order in all the journals covered by the Institute. ISI journals are also categorized into different topics and each category belongs to a specific discipline.

The ISI calculates and reports the Impact Factor (IF) to evaluate all its journals at the end of each year. IF reflects the total citations in a given year to all papers published in the past 2 years divided by the total number of articles and reviews published in the past 2 years.

The Institute also provides a JIF average at the end of each year in a table. JIF is a journal’s IFs average over the years of journal activity at ISI. Journal impact factor applies only to a journal or groups of journals, but not to individual articles or individual researchers.

Conclusion

The quality of an academic and research-based paper is calculated and assessed through various methods and ways, most of which have been explained in two blog posts. Although these standards are insufficient for the scientific evaluation of any publication, and sometimes problematic, there is a consensus that articles published in ISI journals due to adherence to scientific standards and international publishing rules are currently the main basis for determining the quality and quantity of scientific output.