Research Impact Metrics: Journal-Level Metrics

The metric calculations show cased on this page present a starting point for researching journal level metrics.  Most of these also calculate article level metrics as well.  No one metric should be used alone to answer a question about any journal's importance or influence.  Reviewing the background of each metric will be most enlightening.  For instance, researching a journal in JCR first will not only produce the impact factor but also give you the Eigenfactor as well.  Eigenfactor.org also allows one to search by ISI categories found in JCR.  Individual databases may also contain journal level metrics.

Main feature: Impact factor

Producer:  Clarivate Analytics

Articles of Note:

Journal Citation Reports^® is published annually in two editions. (UK users can access JCR from 1997 forward.)

Select which edition you desire the Science or Social Science Edition.

Provides browsable lists of the top 100 journals indexed in Google Scholar by language, with titles ordered by their five-year h-index and h-median metrics. Lists of top 20 journals titles for subject areas are also available.

Main feature:  Eigenfactor score

"The Eigenfactor® score of a journal is an estimate of the percentage of time that library users spend with that journal."

http://www.eigenfactor.org/methods.pdf

Producer:  Is an academic research project co-founded by Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom and sponsored by the Bergstrom Lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington.

Main feature:  H-index 

 Producer:  JE Hirsch  - often calculated in databases such as Web of Science.  Also, this metric often applies to the individual scholar but can also be applied at the journal level.  Google Scholar metrics calculates the H-index and median for a number of journals.

Articles of note: 

The h-index was developed by J.E. Hirsch and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102 (46): 16569-16572 November 15 2005.    http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0508025 ;  http://www.pnas.org/content/102/46/16569