There are a variety of metrics that can be used to rank journals. The most well-know is Impact Factor, a citation measure produced by Thompson Scientific's ISI and published annually in ISI's Journal Citation Reports (JCR). St. Catherine University does not subscribe to this resource, however, alternative journal metrics are available.
SCImago Journal & Country Rank
A free source that includes journal indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus database. It does not include journal impact factors but does have a number of other indicators. Journals may be ranked by major subject areas, more specific subject categories, SJR, h-index, etc.
The Eigenfactor Score calculation is based on the number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR year, but it also considers which journals have contributed these citations so that highly cited journals will influence the network more than lesser cited journals. References from one article in a journal to another article from the same journal are removed, so that Eigenfactor Scores are not influenced by journal self-citation.
SNIP (via CWTS Journal Indicators)
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.
The H-index, or Hirsch index, measures the impact of a particular scientist rather than of a journal. "It is defined as the highest number of publications of a scientist that received h or more citations each while the other publications have not more than h citations each." For example, a scholar with an H-index of 5 has published 5 papers, each of which has been cited by others at least 5 times. An H-index score will vary by database (Web of Science, GoogleScholar, etc.) Alternately, an author's H-index can be calculated manually by locating citation counts for all published papers and ranking them numercially by the times cited.
Publish or Perish is a downloadable software program that retrieves and analyzes academic citations. It uses Google Scholar to obtain the raw citations and then analyzes them using a variety of metrics.
Publish or Perish includes a detailed help file with search tips and additional information about the citation metrics.
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