Journal Metrics in JCR and Scopus updated

2020 Journal Citation Reports

Monday June 29, 2020, Clarivate Analytics has released the 2020 edition of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), which gives access to the 2019 Journal Impact Factors. New in this release is descriptive data on open access models. This provides information about the contribution of gold Open Access articles to a journal’s overall volume of content and citations.

351 journals received their first Journal Impact Factor, including ‘Critical Policy Studies’, ‘Big Data & Society’ and ‘Systematic Reviews’. A full list of the journals new to the JCR is available here. Clarivate has suppressed 33 journals from the JCR, because of anomalous citation behavior, like excessive journal self-citation.

2019 CiteScore in Scopus

Tuesday June 23 2020, Scopus published the CiteScore 2019. The methodology has undergone major changes: 

• Not all publication types are taken into account. Only articles, reviews, conference papers, data papers and book chapters (for book series) are included in the citation numerator and publication denominator.
• Publications in the four years up to and including the calculation year are included. To calculate the CiteScore 2019, publications from 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 are counted. The four-year window is a maximum: when a journal has less than 4 years of data, the CiteScore is calculated as well.
• The citation window is also longer: a four-year window is used. Citations received in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 are counted.
• CiteScore values have one decimal, instead of two.

This new methodology is also used to recalculate the CiteScore values for all previous years (2011-2018). On the Scopus blog you can find more information about the update.

If you want to use these journal metrics, use them responsible! Use them to compare journals, not to compare articles. If you want to compare journals, look at the percentile score of a journal within its own subject area(s), instead of comparing the values themselves.