Demonstrating impact

Journal quality

Journal metrics measure the citation performance and influence of journals, providing one indicator of a journal’s scholarly impact. While they may provide one perspective on journal quality, they should be considered alongside factors such as the journal’s scope, peer review process, editorial standards, audience, and reputation.

Factors to consider when determining the most appropriate journals in which to publish your research include:

  • Discipline relevance and reaching the desired target audience
  • Journal rankings, often determined through the use of metrics
  • Prestige of the editorial team, contributors and journal circulation
  • Accessibility of the journal to a broader audience
  • Open access requirements of publishers and funders

See the Strategic publishing guide for more information.

Journal-level metrics

Journal-level metrics can be found in several sources:

  • SCImago Journal Rank (SJR): Measures a journal’s influence by considering both the number of citations received and the prestige of the journals those citations come from.

  • Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP): Measures a journal’s citation impact while accounting for differences in citation practices between disciplines, making it useful for comparing journals across fields.

  • CiteScore: Measures the average number of citations received per document published in a journal over a four-year period.

You can read more about the journal-level metrics available from Scopus on their website.

You can find SNIP and CiteScore in both the Scopus sources webpage and via SciVal in the Explore section under Journal Quartiles.

Journal benchmarking tools

  • Essential Science Indicators
    Includes title indexed by Web of Science, divided into 22 broad subject categories providing the total number of papers, citations and cites per paper.

  • Scopus Journal Analyser
    A tool in the Scopus database platform that allows the comparison of up to ten journals by CiteScore, SJR, SNIP, numbers of citations and articles and other metrics.

Journal and publisher lists

  • ABDC Journal Ratings List
    Australian Business Deans Council journal ranking list includes 2600 titles reviewed by a panel of discipline experts.

  • Journal Quality List
    A collation of journal rankings from various sources covering economics, finance, accounting, management and training.