Page 129 - Academic and Research Book_WEB

journals. It measures citations received against “citation potential” or citations expected for the subject
field, using Scopus data. Essentially, the longer the reference list of a citing publication, the lower the
value of a citation originating from that publication. The impact of a single citation is given higher
value in subject areas where citations are less likely, and vice versa.
SNIP considers only specific content type citations (articles, reviews, and conference papers), and
does not count citations from publications that Scopus classifies as “non-citing sources”. These include
trade journals, and many Arts and Humanities titles. Published twice a year, SNIP is calculated as the
number of normalized citations given in the present year to publications in the preceding three years
divided by the total number of publications in the preceding three years. A journal with a SNIP of 1.0
has the median (not mean) number of citations for journals in that field.

SCImago Journal and Country Rank

SCImago Journal and Country Rank, developed by SCImago Lab at Granada University, Spain, is a
freely accessible web portal that includes the journals and countries scientific indicators developed
from the information contained in the Scopus database. SCImago’s web analytic environment
facilitates analysing, monitoring and evaluating scientific journals on the one hand and national
science systems on the other. The details of these rankings are available at the website SCImago.com.

Its primary indicator is called SCImago Journal Rank Indicator (SJR) that measures the scientific
prestige of the average article in a journal; in fact, it expresses how central to the global scientific
discussion an average article of the journal is. The SJR indicator aims to capture the effect of subject
field, quality, and reputation of a journal on citations. It calculates the prestige of a journal by
considering the value of the sources that cite it, rather than counting all citations equally. SJR scores
are computed using network analysis of citations received by journals. The methodology accounts for
number of citations as well as the source of citations, with citations from high prestige journals being
worth more than those from lower prestige ones. The prestige value depends on the field, quality, and
reputation of the source journals that the citing article is published in. Each citation received by a
journal is assigned a weight based on the SJR of the citing journal. A citation from a journal with a
high SJR value is worth more than a citation from a journal with a low SJR value.

SCImago uses the Scopus database and journal classification scheme to rank journals across subject
areas and it considers only peer-reviewed articles, reviews, and conference papers. Computation
of SJR is an iterative process that distributes prestige values among the journals until a steady-state
solution is reached, similar to the methodology used for Google PageRankTM. Effectively, the SJR
calculation is by taking average number of (weighted) citations in a given year to a journal, divided
by the number of articles published in the journal in the previous three years The average SJR is now
normalized to be equal to 1, which means that journals with SJRs higher than 1 are more prestigious
than an average journal.
By incorporating citation behaviour in different disciplines into account, SJR can be used to make
comparisons between journals in different disciplines. The effect of SJR is to flatten differences
between fields i.e. citations in high cite fields (for example neuroscience, pharmacology) are worth less
than a citation in a low cite fields (mathematics, humanities).
Along with journal rankings, SCImago laboratory also calculates SCImago Institution Rankings (SIR)
which is a classification of academic and research-related institutions ranked by a composite indicator
that combines three different sets of indicators based on research performance, innovation outputs,
and societal impact measured by their web visibility.

118 | University Grants Commission