Research Guides: Materials Science & Engineering: Impact & Metrics

Measuring Journal Impact

Use journal impact measures to compare the citation activity of journals, which can be useful for determining where to publish or describing your achievement in getting an article accepted in a highly impactful journal. UMD has access to the Journal Citation Reports database (see below), which gives many of these metrics when you look at specific journal titles. These measures do not analyze the relative impact of individual authors, which is described later on this page. For more details on these metrics see this LibGuide on metrics: https://lib.guides.umd.edu/bibliometrics

Journal Impact Factor (Thomson Reuters/Clarivate):

Scimago Journal Ranking (Elsevier): Size-independent metric for journals that also takes into account how close citations are to the original journal (how well it is reaching related journals) and includes country-specific data. For more information on how it is calculated see this article on SJR2.
Eigenfactor Score (Thomson Reuters/Clarivate): Measures the number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) year. Is a ratio like Journal Impact Factor, but also eliminates self-citations and has additional weighting factors, including being normalized such that all journal eigenfactor scores add up to 100 in JCR. (Note: if you are curious how this term relates to matrices, see this document on how eigenfactor scores are calculated.)
Journal acceptance rate: These vary depending on your discipline, but are generally calculated based on all submitted articles or only reviewed articles.

Journal Citation Reports
Calculates "Impact Factor" for journals using citation data from over 5000 journals in the sciences and 1500 journals in the social sciences. Compare Impact Factors by subject category, publisher, or country.

Author Measures: h-index and i10-index

The h-index is an attempt to quantify the research output of people. Also known as the Hirsch index, it measures the impact of a particular scientist rather than a journal, and is defined as the number of publications that have received at least the same number of citations. For example, a scholar with an h-index of 5 had published 5 papers, each of which has been cited by others at least 5 times. Again see the metrics LibGuide for further information on this topic: lib.guides.umd.edu/bibliometrics/h-index

Another researcher metric is the i10-index, which measures the number of publications with more than 10 citations. Depending on your field, either or both of these researcher metrics may be useful to quantify the impact of your research (especially important for tenure or other promotions).

**NOTE: Each of the tools listed below calculates metrics based solely on citations contained in that database. If the database doesn't include the journal(s) your paper(s) is in, your h-index (or i10-index) information may be inaccurate.

Google Scholar
Click the small arrow in the search box to run an advanced search by author. If the search returns a matching author profile, that will give you the most accurate results. Otherwise, you can click the gear icon and select Metrics to see an analysis of the entire results set, which will likely contain extraneous entries. Google Scholar calculates h-index using citations contained in Google Scholar.