The SJR indicator: A new indicator of journals' scientific prestige

TL;DR

This paper introduces the SJR indicator, a new metric for ranking scholarly journals based on citation networks, which offers a different perspective from traditional impact factors and reveals notable differences in journal rankings.

Contribution

The paper presents the SJR indicator, a novel citation-based metric using eigenvector centrality, and compares its performance and rankings to the Journal Impact Factor within the Scopus database.

Findings

SJR and JIF distributions follow a power law.

SJR and JIF are strongly correlated but show rank shifts.

SJR may reduce impact factor values for highly cited journals.

Abstract

This paper proposes an indicator of journals' scientific prestige, the SJR indicator, for ranking scholarly journals based on citation weighting schemes and eigenvector centrality to be used in complex and heterogeneous citation networks such Scopus. Its computation methodology is described and the results after implementing the indicator over Scopus 2007 dataset are compared to an ad-hoc Journal Impact Factor both generally and inside specific scientific areas. The results showed that SJR indicator and JIF distributions fitted well to a power law distribution and that both metrics were strongly correlated, although there were also major changes in rank. There was an observable general trend that might indicate that SJR indicator values decreased certain JIF values whose citedeness was greater than would correspond to their scientific influence.