Faculty Scholarship Resources: Journal Ranking

The resources outlined on this page will assist in locating quantitative data for assessing journal quality. Note that such tools tend to be more useful for publications in natural and social sciences.

Journal impact factors change over time. They also differ greatly from one field to another. For example, Althouse and Bergstrom (2008) show that 2004 weighted impact factor for mathematics journals was 0.56; for molecular and cell biology it was eight times as high, 4.76.

Disciplinary differences in impact factors have to do with varied citation practices across fields, discipline-dependent lag times between publication and citation, as well as the discipline-specific number of citations an average article includes.

Althouse, B. M., West, J. D., Bergstrom, C. T., & Bergstrom, T. (2009). Differences in impact factor across fields and over time. Journal Of The American Society For Information Science & Technology, 60(1), 27-34.

SCOPUS  provides access to peer-reviewed journal titles from international publishers in science, technology, social science and medicine. In the newest interface, an easy-to-miss "Compare Journals" link in the top right corner of the main search box will take you to a new journal comparison page. You will be able to enter up to 10 journal titles and compare them across several factors relating to the journal's quality including CiteScore, SJR, SNIP, as well as the number of citations.

Journal Citation Reports {The library no longer subscribes to this Web of Science database, but you may access it on site at the Graduate Center.) The number of articles published in journals indexed by the Web of Science and the number of citations to individual journals. This information may be viewed by journal name, subject, publisher, and country or territory. Be sure to choose science or social sciences before selecting a subject. For more information on how to use the database, see this University of Michigan guide.

Eigenfactor.org Free and searchable, this database covers the natural and social sciences and "lists newsprint, PhD theses, popular magazines and more." The Eigenfactor is also included in Journal Citation Reports (see above).

SCImago Journal & Country Rank A freely accessible web-based portal that derives its rankings of journals based on data from Scopus® database (since 1996).

ERIH (The European Reference Index for the Humanities) is a reference index created and developed by European researchers

ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia) is an ongoing initiative. Its tasks include the development of Ranked Journal List and Ranked Conference List.

Criticisms

• impact factor was never intended to measure the performance of individual researchers and papers
• not sufficient to capture how influential a journal is
• relies on a skewed distribution, or the 80/20 rule: a small percentage of the papers accounts for a very large portion of the influence
• review journals have an advantage over non-review journals
• impact factors vary across disciplines and cross-field comparisons are not possible

Pendlebury, D. (2009). The use and misuse of journal metrics and other citation indicators. Archivum Immunologiae et Therapiae Experimentalis, 57 (1), 1-11.