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Journal Ranking

Introduction

Quantitative analysis of journals is a way traditional peer review may be augmented to gain a more complete picture of a scholar's impact in his chosen field. Three measures can be used:

  • number of publications
  • number of times an author's publications have been cited
  • the importance of the journal where the article is published, or the Journal Ranking.

Knowing the impact or importance of the journal can help in decisions about where an author will choose to submit an article. Libraries and librarians also use journal rankings to make decisions about collection development.

The journal rankings can be accessed through Web of Science or Web of Knowledge (Until now our Library does not subcribe this database). Journals may be searched by individual title, by date, or by subject category. In contrast to Eigenfactor, journals may belong to more than one category. 

In addition to Journal Citation Reports, there are some other sources for journal rankings. These are listed in a page entitled journal ranking papes under the Journal Rankings tab on this LibGuide:

Order
Tool of Journal Ranking
1           
Eigenfactor.org
A free and searchable database, Eigenfactor covers the natural and social sciences and "also lists newsprint, PhD theses, popular magazines and more.". It continues to be listed here for use on its own.The website includes an interactive mapping function that shows the relationship of branches of science to each other based on the size of the field and the citations generated by the journals of the field. Rather than the "soft" categories used in Journal Citation Reports, where a journal may be located in one or more categories, Eigenfactor uses a hard category where a journal can only fit in one discipline.The website includes several quick top ten lists in science, social science, university theses, newspapers, and magazines.
2
Google Scholar Metrics
Ranks publications in Google Scholar by analyzing the last five years of journal articles from websites that follow Google's inclusion guidelines as well as conference articles and preprints from a small number of manually identified sources. Excludes publications with less than 100 articles during the five-year period and those with no citations. The metrics provided are the h-index, h-core, h-median, h5-index, h5-core, and h5-median.

3

Harzing.com - Journal Quality List
Compiles rankings of journals from various sources in the areas of Economics, Finance, Accounting, Management, and Marketing.

4

Humanities Journal Rankings
European Science Foundation's subgroup for the Humanities.  Scroll down to see a table that contains links to journal rankings in the Humanities.

5

 

Journal-Ranking.com
This source ranks journals that are indexed by ISI's Science Citation Index. The website allows you to customize your ranking and is interactive.

 

6

 

Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)
Based on Scopus data, SNIP is a European ranking that attempts to address the problems of varying citation rates among disciplines and the lack of statistics to indicate levels of significant differences.

 

7

 

SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR)
A free source that uses data from Elsevier's Scopus database. Includes a "compare" feature that compares journal citation among countries. There is also a "map generator" that shows citation relationships by country. The SJR indicator aims to measure "the current 'average prestige per paper'" of research journals and is one of a new set of journal rangings based on eigenvector centrality (Gonzalez-Pereira 2009) .


Ranking by Percentile

Because impact factors vary among disciplines, one cannot meaningfully compare two journals in different disciplines using impact factors. For this reason, it is helpful to see how a journal ranks based on other journals in the subject category.  First find the journal to see what discipline or subject category/categories it falls within.  Then find the total number of journals in the subject area.  Subtract the ranking of the journal from the total number of journals and divide by the number of journals in the subject area minus 1.  Thus you will find the percentile ranking. 

Formula:

n=number of journals in the subject category

n-rank/n-1 x 100 =percentile