Tools for evaluating journals and ranking them

Bibliometric tools and indices provide quantitative measures to assess a journal's impact and significance in the academic community.

Common methods for rating journals are based on statistical measures that examine the citation frequency of each of them in later texts. It is assumed that the more times an article is cited, the greater its impact on the research discourse.

Advantages:

• The ranking allows researchers to choose the journals that have a high impact on their field of research.
• The ranking serves as an important tool for evaluating the impact and relevance of academic research.
• Citation analysis helps support research, identify leading scientists, and trace the connections between their research groups.
• Reflects the leading journals in a certain research field.
• Enables the assessment of the journal's quality and reliability
• The journal's success contributes to its publication and raising the publisher's prestige.
• The journal's success contributes to its publication and raising the publisher's prestige.
• The rating encourages competition between journals, which also creates competition between the authors of the articles on the quality of the content.
• Influences decision-making regarding building the collection in light of budget and space limitations.
• Journal rankings have a considerable and profound effect on universities and academic research.

Disadvantages:

• Self-citation problem: Self-citations by researchers artificially inflate the metrics.
• Time factor: Rating methods based on citation counting give a distinct advantage to older journals. It can be assumed that between two journals of equal quality, the old journal will receive a greater number of citations
• Quality problem: Many critique articles may have been written following the publication of a bad article; hence the level of citation does not indicate the quality. And vice versa: a mediocre journal that publishes a quality article will get more citations and an improvement in its ranking.
• A rating method based on citations counting does not express possible changes in the level of a given journal.
• Counting-based methods give an advantage to journals that publish more articles. The higher the frequency of publication, the greater the number of citations in the journal.

There are several impact indicators, from different databases:

Journal Impact Factor (JIF), (Q) Quartiles - from the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database based on publications from the WOS database

 CiteScore, Scimago Journal rank (SJR) - based on publications in the SCOPUS database

Google Scholar Metrics - metrics based on the Google Scholar database.

JCR – Journal Citation Reports

The JCR database led by Thomson Reuters allows the evaluation of leading journals of over 3300 publishers in various fields from 1997 onwards, whose articles appear in the Web of Science database. The database is updated once a year.

Key features of this database

• In this database you can Identify leading journals using topic categories, author names and research organization names.
• Providing a profile and history of a journal.
• Compare competing journals from the same category with maximum IF.
• Filtering outstanding journals, and journals accessible through Open Access.
• Filtering research articles versus review articles.
• Specifying the names of journals removed from the database due to a high number of self-citations, and analyzing the percentage of citations.
• Calculation of the average age of the citations in the article, within a maximum range of 10 years (Half Cited Year).
• Download data in various formats.
• Statistics in visual form.
• Navigating consecutive data from year to year.
  
  

JCR platform is based on several main indicators:

• JIF: This is the Journal Impact Factor, the oldest and accepted index for evaluating journals.
  The index is based on more than 20,000 journals in exact sciences, social sciences, and humanities and arts.
• IF is a relative calculation of the citations of each published article; The higher the IF, the higher the value of the journal
• The Impact Factor of a particular year checks the average of citations to articles published in the two previous years, the number of times articles in the journal were cited in a particular year divided by the total number of cited articles published in that year
• (The Impact Factor of a certain journal for 2024 will be the average of citations for articles published in the journal in 2022-2023).
• Starting in 2024, the distinction between the field of sciences (nature, life, exact, etc.) and the field of social sciences was abolished and one unified index was created for both fields.
• The index depends on the field and is not absolute, and varies greatly between the different fields of science. According to several studies, it appears that journals that publish articles in open access (Open Access) receive citations at a higher rate.

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  JCI - Journal Citation Indicator
  The JCI, introduced in 2020, is a significant bibliometric index that offers a nuanced approach to journal evaluation:
• Calculation: Considers articles published in the previous three years and citations from the current year
• Example: The 2024 JCI will analyze the ratio of articles published in 2021-2023 to citations from 2021-2024
• Significance: Provides a broader perspective on journal performance, especially beneficial for humanities and arts fields where traditional rankings can be less reliable.

Eigenfactor Score

•  This index checks the influence of a journal according to citation data five years back while examining the source from which the citations came.
• This index gives greater weight to citations in leading journals.
  
  

Immediate impact

• reference to the number of citations in the same year the journal was published (immediate impact).

SCOPUS - Elsevier API

Scopus, led by Elsevier, is a comprehensive database covering approximately 22,000 journals
• Includes journals from humanities and arts, exact sciences, and social sciences

Key functions:

• Evaluates articles and periodicals across disciplines from 1996 onwards
• Provides author evaluation
• Locating top journals using subject categories.
• Evaluate peer-reviewed journals and all article types
• Providing a profile and history of a journal.
• Enables comparison between competing journals from different categories
• Evaluation of journals lacking Impact Factor.
• It is marking journals that are accessible through Open Access.
• Limiting their inclusion in the database of about 33% of journals with a high number of self-citations.
• Calculates average citations per article within a 3-year
• maximum period
• Supports data download in various formats
• Presents statistics visually
• Navigating consecutive data from year to year.

Additional indices based on the Scopus database:

CiteScore: The central ranking of the database refers to the relative ranking of the journal in the research field to which it belongs. A journal's ranking in a particular year is determined by the average of citations to articles published in the three years preceding it.

SNIP=Source Normalized Impact per Paper: The impact index of each article within the journal, with an emphasis on the research topic. The calculation focuses on the average of the citations in the article in relation to the total of all citations in the subject field.

SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) : A rating that refers to the prestige of the citing journal and its reputation (giving priority to journals considered to be of higher quality), with an emphasis on the research topic, the quality and reputation of the journal. The calculation was made over 4 years. The SJR data is free and open to all.

The Impact per Publication (IPP): Measures the average number of citations per year in research articles published in the previous three years, divided by the number of academic articles published in those years.

W&L Law Journal Rankings

A central tool for evaluating and ranking legal journals worldwide. The index is maintained by the law library of Washington and Lee University School of Law.

The site publishes an annual ranking of legal journals based on citation data, and in the latest version (2024), the rankings of the top 400 law journals in the United States and an additional 100 from outside the U.S. are presented, based on citations and additional metrics collected over the past five years. The tool allows filtering and searching by topics, metrics such as impact factor and number of citations, and even provides historical data for cross-comparison between journals over time.

The index is based on a combination of prominent citation data, with emphasis on balancing between the journal's total number of citations (Journal and Case Cites) and the Impact Factor - the average number of citations per article.

The final Combined Score weighs one-third for Impact Factor and two-thirds for total number of citations, and is normalized to a scale of 100 for comparison between journals. This weight was chosen after equilibrium tests between journals in an attempt to create a ranking system that balances between technical impact (how much each article is cited) and overall impact in the legal field.

Additionally, the index refers to the past five years, and new journals are given an adjustment that takes into account the journal's age, so as not to discriminate against recently established journals.

ABDC journal ranking

The Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) Journal Quality List is a widely recognized ranking system for academic journals in business and related disciplines.

Ranking Categories: Journals are classified into four tiers: A+, A, B, C

The ABDC journal rankings emphasize excellence in specific fields, while the Scopus index enhances the visibility of research publications.

The ABDC list aims to guide researchers, academics, and stakeholders in identifying quality outlets for research publication.

The ranking considers factors such as peer-review processes, editorial board quality, citation metrics, and global diversity of contributors.

The ranking considers various factors, including the peer review processes, the quality of the editorial board, citation metrics, and the global diversity of contributors.

List of ABDC quality journal - Click here

The Israeli higher education system's budgeting model

The Israeli higher education system's budgeting model, established by the Committee for Planning and Budgeting under the Council for Higher Education, incorporates both teaching and research components. The research component evaluates faculty members' scientific output using quantitative data on publications and their scientific impact. While this model is not applicable to private academic institutions, it's important to note that the model relies on the Impact Factor (IF) index as reported in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) from Clarivate's Web of Science

Google - Google Scholar Metrics 

Google Scholar's top journals ranking, built from a list of the 100 most cited journals in each field of knowledge. The top journals can be seen broken down into fields and subfields, including fields not ideally covered by the other databases such as the humanities and arts. The ranking is based on h5-index which refers to articles published in the last five years. H = the number of articles in the journal that were cited H times (for example: 50 articles were cited at least 50 times).