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Journal Citation Reports (JCR)

A group of researchers at the University of Washington developed a similar algorithm for the
evaluation of the influence of scientific journals included in the Thompson Scientific Journal Citation
Reports (JCR) dataset.

Journal and Country Rank (SCImago)

Alternatives to the IF have been emerging, such as the SCImago Journal and Country Rank. The Page
Rank algorithm, used in the evaluation of web pages by the popular Google search engines, has been
proposed as an appropriate model for the evaluation of the quality of citations in scientific journals.
Furthermore, another research group from Spanish Universities developed an indicator, named the
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator, for the assessment of the quality of scientific journals, applying
the Page Rank algorithm on the Scopus database. The SCImago journal rank indicator is a novel
instrument for the evaluation of scientific journals that may challenge the established premiership of
the journal IF in ranking scientific journals. It provides unrestricted (open) access, is based on a larger
source journal database, and focuses on the quality of citations that a journal receives by other journals,
rather than the absolute number. However, the sophisticated methodology used in the calculation of the
SJR indicator needs to be adequately validated, and certain characteristics may need to be reconsidered
before definitive conclusions for its applicability could be drawn. It appears, though, that the election of
one index or the other would be mostly a matter of whether the popularity or the quality of a journal is
considered as the primary criterion for the evaluation of scientific journals.

Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)

Another metric known as Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) is a sophisticated metric
that intrinsically accounts for field-specific differences in citation practices. It does so by comparing
each journal’s citations per publication with the citation potential of its field, defined as the set of
publications citing that journal. SNIP therefore measures contextual citation impact and enables
direct comparison of journals in different subject fields, since the value of a single citation is greater
for journals in fields where citations are less likely, and vice versa. SNIP is calculated annually from
Scopus data and is freely available alongside CiteScore and SJR.

Impact Per Publication (IPP)

The impact per publication is calculated as the number of citations given in the present year to
publications in the past three years divided by the total number of publications in the past three years.
IPP is fairly similar to the well-known journal IF. Like the IF, IPP does not correct for differences
in citation practices between scientific fields. IPP was previously known as RIP (Raw Impact per
Publication). IPP and SNIP are provided with stability intervals. A stability interval reflects the
stability or reliability of an indicator. If for a particular source IPP and SNIP have a wide stability
interval, the indicators have a low reliability for this source. This, for instance, means that the
indicators are likely to fluctuate quite significantly over time.

CiteScore

CiteScore metrics are a suite of indicators calculated from data in Scopus, the world’s leading abstract
and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. CiteScore itself is an average of the sum of the

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