SCImago Journal and Country rank portal (SJR)
Bibliometrics Product Profile sheet
website: http://www.ndlr.ie/myri/
Last edited: Jan 13 2011
1. Name of the product
SCImago Journal and Country rank portal (SJR)
2. Access
Free web-based service.
3. Web link
http://www.scimagojr.com/
4. Related products
The SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator used here is now also included in
Scopus. Eigenfactor is a similar metric, also freely available at
eigenFACTOR.org, and incorporates weighting by the influence of the citing
publication.
For journal ranking, Scopus and Journal Citation Reports are the main
subscription alternatives.
For country rankings Essential Science Indicators is a subscription service also
providing that.
5. Main bibliometric
and related uses
a. Journal Ranking
i) Browse or search for a journal and view results graphically or in tabular
form
For each year, around 15 figures are returned including: the SJR journal
impact ranking; the h-index for the article set from the journal as a whole; the
number of documents published; number of citations over various rolling
periods; number of articles cited and never cited; and % of articles showing
international collaboration in the author affiliations
ii) Use the Compare option to compare up to four journals
1
b. Country Ranking
i) Browse through the global set for one year or the whole year range offered
for overall country rankings, or limit to rankings within a particular region. Or
look at rankings for a particular research discipline
A summary for each country shows number of documents, number of
citations and self-cites, average citations per document and the h-index for
the country/subject
Select a country row for a yearly breakdown and some additional
information, including % international collaboration, and % of output this
country contributes for the region and the world research output
ii) Use the Compare option to compare various up to four countries
6. The dataset
SCImago is a joint venture of the Universities of Granada, Extremadura, and
Carlos III (Madrid) with Consejo Superior de Investigaciones (Spanish National
Research Council). It is dedicated to information analysis, representation,
and retrieval using visualisation techniques.
Its journal ranking uses a subset of Elsevier’s Scopus as its data source.
7. Other notable
features
Country Analyser is a feature not found in the major suites from Thomson
Reuter and Elsevier.
Comparison of journals or countries is a key feature.
Visualisation is central.
International collaboration features both in the journal ranking tables and in
the Map Generator option which shows not just % collaboration but also
maps where that collaboration occurs regionally – can be slow to process.
2
The SJR metric varies from the ISI Journal Impact Factor in that it takes into
account the prestige of the citing publication.
“In spite of some shortcomings, this is an awesome service that can help
librarians in journal collection management base their decision on facts. It is a
masterpiece of state-of-the- art design in the library world.” Peter Jacso,
Online May/June 2009.
8. Issues
Like Scopus the citations that are included in the analysis only go back to
1996 – both for citing articles and cited articles.
9. Further information
Jacsó, P., 2010. Comparison of journal impact rankings in the SCImago Journal
& Country Rank and the Journal Citation Reports databases, Online
Information Review, [Online]34 (4). Pp. 642 – 657. Available from:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/14684521011073034 [Accessed 06 Jan 2011].
Abstract:
“The purpose of this paper is to compare the journal impact rankings of the
open access SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR) database and the
subscription-based Journal Citation Reports (JCR) ... The open access SJR
database offers very informative new insights to complement those that have
been provided by the JCR for more than three decades by the Institute for
Scientific Information (ISI) and its successor, the Thomson (later ThomsonReuters) company. Especially valuable are its features of weighting the
citations received based on the prestige of the citing journals, the (partial)
exclusion of journal self-citations, and the broader base of source journals.
They provide new opportunities to analyse and understand their effects on
the ranking of journals.”
3