Searching Scopus: Journal Metrics
Created by Health Science Librarians
How Can I Assess Journal Impact?
Different measures are used to assess the quality and impact of a journal. These measures are one factor to consider when deciding where to publish your work.
See the chart below to find out more about measures of journal impact. Click on the links in the boxes at the bottom of the table to find out how to get these measures.
Common Measures of Journal Impact
| Impact Factor (IF) | Eigenfactor | SCImago Journal Ranking (SJR) | Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) | |
| Measure of... | Frequency with which the 'average article' in a journal has been cited in a particular year or other defined time period | Measure of importance: overall value provided by all articles published in a a journal in one year | Measure of prestige; accounts for number of citations received by a journal and importance of the journals that citations came from | Measures citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field |
| Calculation | A: Number of citations in the current year to items published in the journal in the previous two years B: Total number of articles published in the journal in the previous two years Impact Factor = A/B |
Citations from high-quality journals are weighted more than citations from lesser known journals |
Citations from more prestigious journals (higher SJR) weighted more than citations from less prestigious journals (lower SJR) |
Citations from subject fields in which citations are less likely are weighted more |
| Can it be used to compare journals from different disciplines? | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Where can I get it? | Journal Citation Reports OR the journal's website | Journal Citation Reports OR free from Eigenfactor.org | Scopus OR free from SCImago Journal & Country Rank | Scopus OR free from CWTS Journal Indicators |
Note: As of January 2022, the UNC Libraries no longer subscribe to the Journal Citation Reports, which provide the Journal Impact Factors.
Journal Impact in Scopus
Scopus is a resource for evaluating and comparing journals. Provides SCImago Journal Ranking (SJR) and Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) for more than 19,000 journals.
The Compare Sources feature in Scopus can be used to view and compare the following metrics for up to 10 journals at a time:
- SJR
- SNIP
- Number of citations received in a year
- Number of documents published in a year
- Percentage of documents published in a year that have never been cited
- Percentage of articles that are review articles
*Note: If you wish to view the SJR only, you can do so if you go to the SJR Website
Find SJR and SNIP
- To access the Compare Sources feature, click on Compare Sources to the right of the search box on the Scopus homepage
- Enter a journal title or title word in the search box on the Compare Sources page
- You can limit by subject area; this is helpful if you have entered a single word in the search box and want to view a list of journals for a particular subject area. Often times the search box will bring up a list of results with matching terms so you can choose your journal.
- Once you click on your journal, the metrics will be shown on the right, and you can click on the tabs at the top to navigate to the metric that you like. As of October 2017, the current options for viewable metrics are CiteScore, SJR, SNIP, Citations, Documents, % Not Cited, % Reviews.
- To add additional journals to the chart, repeat the search process.
- By default, metrics are displayed in a line chart. To change the display, click on the Table link at the top of the chart.
Scopus Homepage
Compare Sources with Search Box and Metrics Displayed
Scopus Author Impact
Scopus is a citation database that indexes journals, trade publications and conference proceedings in the health and natural sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities with citation data available from 1996 to present. Scopus does not have complete citation information for articles published prior to 1996.
Create a citation report and calculate your h-index
Search for citations by author:
- Click on the Author search tab on the Scopus homepage.
- Enter the author's last name and initials or first name into the appropriate search boxes.
- Enter affiliation information in the search box, if you so choose.
- Click Search.
Scopus Homepage
Select documents to include in citation report:
- Scopus will display a list of authors that meet your search criteria. Your name may appear more than once.
- To view documents for a particular author, click on the box next to the author name and then, click on Show documents at the top of the results
Create Citation Report:
- On the document results page, select the documents that you would like to include in your citation report. To include all documents, click on the box next to All at the top of the results.
- Then, click View citation overview at the top of the results
- The citation overview displays the number of times each document has been cited
- Click on View h-graph to view the h-index for the documents in the citation overview
- To export your citation overview, click the Export link in the upper right-hand corner of the page
Scopus Results Page
View Author Details:
- Run an Author search (see above)
- On the author results page, click on the name of the author whose details you would like to view
- The Author details page displays
- Affiliation
- Number of documents published (that are indexed in Scopus)
- Total citations
- h-Index
More information on Journal Metrics
