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Journal metrics
The range of models used to measure the impact of journals and articles is constantly increasing, though most are based on the level of citations. As a signatory to DORA, the Royal Society offers a variety of journal and article-based metrics. We are also a member of the Initiative for Open Citations (i4OC) which is a multi-stakeholder project to make scholarly citation data openly available to enable the creation of new and better metrics.
Impact Factor
2020 Journal Citation Reports (JCR) (Clarivate Analytics)
|
Impact Factor |
6.237 |
|
5-year Impact Factor |
7.828 |
|
Total cites |
56,921 |
|
Immediacy index |
2.887 |
|
Eigenfactor |
0.05573 |
Impact Factor
A measure of how often an average article in a journal has been cited. The impact factor of a journal is calculated by dividing the number of current year citations by total number of published articles in the journal during the previous 2 years.
5-year Impact Factor
The impact factor calculated using a base of 5 years' worth of cited articles, rather than 2 years. This gives a fairer picture of journals in fields with slower citation patterns, such as mathematics.
Immediacy index
The average number of times that an article is cited in the same year it is published.
Eigenfactor
A measure of the number of times articles from the journal have been cited in the JCR year. It is a ratio of the number of citations to total number of articles but unlike Impact Factor, it counts citations in both science and the social sciences, it eliminates self-citations (citations of articles published in the same journal) and weights each reference according to the amount of time spent reading that article. The scores are weighted so the sum Eigenfactor scores from all journals in JCR is 100.
Citation distribution
The distribution of citations to articles over the previous 2 years that contributes to the current year’s impact factor. This data is from Scopus and includes full articles only (i.e. excludes corrections etc.).
Scopus metrics
2020 rankings
|
Citescore |
10.9 |
|
SNIP |
1.91 |
CiteScore
Very much like the Impact Factor except that it is based on the larger Scopus dataset and uses 4 years of data. CiteScore 2020 counts the citations received in 2016-2019 to articles published in 2017-2020, and divides this by the number of publications published in 2017-2020.
Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)
Measures contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field. The impact of a single citation is given higher value in subject areas where citations are less likely, and vice versa.
Altmetrics
Altmetrics are non-traditional metrics proposed as an alternative to citation impact metrics.
We use a partner organisation called Altmetric to track and display the online activity around an article. Altmetric track social media sites, newspapers and magazines for mentions of each published article. The aim is to help authors quantify the attention their article is receiving and to help readers establish the articles their peers think are interesting.
The Altmetric ‘doughnut’ can be found on the ‘Details’ tab of each article.
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