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Assessing Impact: Metrics, Altmetrics and Impact Factors

This guide highlights important metrics used to measure journal impact, author impact and article impact.

Journal Level Metrics 


Journal Impact Factors (Clarivate Analytics and Web of Science)

Journal Impact Factor is a measure reflecting the yearly average number of citations to recent articles published in that journal.  Published in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) on an annual basis and often found on the websites of the journals. Also listed in the Web of Science database.

TOP Factor 

Created by the Center for Open Science, the factor serves as an alternative to the Journal Impact Factor.  It uses  a rubric for evaluating journal policies for adherence to the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines.  

Eigenfactor   

Measures impact of scholarly journals by the broad dissemination of their articles.

Citescore 

The average citations per document that a journal title receives over a three-year period.   

SCImago Journal Ranking (SJR) in Elsevier SCOPUS 

 Gives weightage to citations from influential journals. 

Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)

Ranking that corrects for the differences in citation practices in different disciplines. 

H5 Index And H5 Median (Google Scholar Metrics)

Based on citations collected from the last five years of a journal’s publication history.