Faculty and Researcher Resources

Impact Factor is a metric provided by Journal Citation Reports (JCR), which is owned by Clarivate. The JCR was recently embedded within Web of Science (WoS), which the HSL does not license.  While our access to the JCR is currently still active, it could be discontinued at any time.

Scopus offers a comparable service, Sources / CiteScore, which counts 2017-2020 citations of articles, reviews, conference papers, book chapters and data papers published in 2017-2020, then divides this by the number of 2017-2020 publications. 

In addition to the CiteScore (impact score) Scopus Sources also provides:

• Percentile, the relative standing of a journal in its subject field
• Total number of citations (previous four full calendar years), used as the numerator in the CiteScore
• Total number of documents (previous four full calendar years), used as the denominator in the CiteScore
• Percent cited, the percentage of documents cited in the journal
• SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper), measures measures the impact of a paper within a subject field
• SJR (SCImago Journal Rank), measures citations weighted by prestige, see below

Both the JCR Impact Factor and Scopus CiteScore divide the number of document citations by the number of documents published to score a journal.  Differences include:

• Database queried: JCR pulls data from Web of Science, CiteSouces pulls from Scopus.
• Types of publications included: JCR includes articles and reviews, CiteSource includes  articles, reviews, conference papers, data papers and book chapters. 
• Time period covered:  JCR's calculations are based on the previous two years, CiteSource uses the last four years.

Learn more about the CiteScore methodology.

Eigenfactor.org 

The Eigenfactor provides an indication of the overall contribution of a journal to the literature, which is not the same as Impact Factor.

Using an algorithm similar to that of Google's ‘PageRank’ to count citations to / from of the journal and weighing them according to the ranking of the source / destination, it is intended to reflect how likely a journal is to be read, and for how long. 

SCImago Journal & Country Rank 

Uses the Scopus database to measure citations weighted by prestige. Database includes: SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), h-index, and annual citations by document.