In every field or discipline, there are journals that scholars consider prestigious and influential. If you ask instructors about the most prestigious journals for research in their disciplines, they can easily name them.
Journals are judged by a variety of metrics that look at the impact of articles published in that journal. The metrics usually look at how many citations that papers published in the journal receive over time.
Tools to Help You Determine Significant Journals in Your Field
- Journal Citation Reports (Part of Web of Science): An objective resource that will help to evaluate journals through citation data. Use this tool to determine which journals are the most influential in your subject area. One metric that is provided is the journal's impact factor which is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year.
- SCImago Journal & Country Rank: A free portal with journal rankings by subject and country based on data from Scopus. Its ranks journals according to the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator, which calculates journal influence by looking at both the number of citations received by a journal and the importance of the journal where the citation was published. It also offers other metrics, such as the H index, citations per document, references per document, and more. Journals can be analyzed by broad subject area, narrow subject category, or by country. An alternative ranking metric to the impact factor.
