Elsevier Debuts Metrics Tracking Journal Performance
Elsevier has come up with its own system for ranking journals that aims to provide “a more comprehensive, transparent and current view of a journal’s impact” to help assess the quality of academic journals, according to a blog post announcement from the company.
The new CiteScore metrics are part of Elsevier’s Scopus basket of journal metrics, which is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. CiteScore covers twice as many journals as the commonly used “impact factor” (a measure of the frequency a particular article in a journal has been cited in a particular year), providing insight into the citation impact of more than 22,000 titles compared to 11,000 titles. And unlike impact factor, CiteScore includes includes all documents as potentially citable, including editorials, letters to the editor, news items and more, which can affect the overall score for journal’s impact. Thus, some journals, like Nature and Science, have a high impact factor but significantly drop in the CiteScore index.
Further information is available on the Elsevier blog.