Library: Research Impact and Scholarly Metrics: SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) (2024)

SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a publicly available resource that includes journals and scientific indicators developed from the information provided in the Scopus database.

Journals are ranked by the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), which attempts to factor in subject field, quality, and reputation of a journal on citations.

Why use SJR?

• Free, public resource (no subscription needed)
• Ranks more journals than Journal Citation Reports (uses citation data from Scopus)
• Covers all disciplines
• Rankings are normalized to account for differences in citation behavior between disciplines

SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) measures the frequency with which content published in a journal was cited in other journals during the three previous years (compared to previous two years with Journal Impact Factor).

SCImago's ranking system is rooted in the belief that citations from prestigious journals are worth more than those from less prestigious journals. SJR weights each incoming citation to a journal by the SJR of the citing journal, with a citation from a source with a high SJR counting for more than a citation from a source with a low SJR.

SCImago attempts to normalize their rankings to account for differences in citation behavior between disciplines. The scoring scale brings everything down to 1 for easy comparison. A journal with a SJR value > 1.0 has above average citation potential and journal with a SJR value < 1.0 has below average citation potential.