Course Research Impacts: Finding & comparing journals

Scopus also provides information on the journal level. This information can help you decide which journals are important in your field of research or in which journal you should (try to) publish.

Here we cover:

• Finding journals in a subject category
• Journal metrics in Scopus
• Comparing journals

Sources is one of the options on top of the screen in Scopus. When you click this link, you can search for publication titles: you can search by subject area, title, publisher or ISSN.

When you search by Subject Area, you have to make a selection from the dropdown menu.

In the overview you can click a title to go to the Source details. Here you can see the assigned subject area(s), the coverage in Scopus, the ISSN and the e-ISSN (if available). You can see the most recent CiteScore, SJR and SNIP (see 'Journal metrics in Scopus').

At the bottom you get more information about CiteScore and the content coverage in Scopus.

SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)

SJR assigns relative scores to all of the sources in a citation network. Not all citations are equal: subject field, quality and reputation of the journal has a direct impact on the value of a citation. A source transfers its own 'prestige', or status, to another source through the act of citing it. A citation from a source with a relatively high SJR is worth more than a citation from a source with a lower SJR.
This metric was developed by SCImago, a Spanish research group dedicated to information analysis, representation and retrieval by means of visualisation techniques.

SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper)

SNIP measures a source’s contextual citation impact, by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a given subject field. This subject field is defined by the papers that cite the journal, it’s not based on the subject areas used in Scopus! The impact of a single citation is given a higher value in subject fields where citations are less likely, and vice versa.
More information about the SNIP can be found in the article of Henk Moed, the creator of the SNIP, and on the journal indicators website of CWTS. Lisa Colledge et al. published a useful overview article about SJR and SNIP.

CiteScore

The average citations per document that a title receives over a four-year period. As an example, to calculate a 2021 value, CiteScore counts the citations received in 2018 to 2021 to documents (articles, reviews, conference papers, book chapters and data papers) published in 2018 to 2021. The citation count is then divided by the number of articles, reviews, conference papers, book chapters and data papers, published in the journal, indexed on Scopus published in 2018 to 2021. A list is available on https://www.scopus.com/sources. 
If a journal has less than four years of publications in Scopus, the CiteScore is calculated based on the available data (so over less than four years). 

To compare journals you can use the option Compare sources - visible when you are on the Source details page of a journal. 

You can perform a search to find the journals you want to compare. When you mark them in the list on the left side, the graph on the right side is updated.

You can compare journals by CiteScore, SNIP, SJR, citations, documents, percent not cited and percentage reviews per year.