SJR @ Scimago - Not the usual Impact Factor

For those of you thinking of publishing your research, trying to secure tenure or looking for the next grant to fund your research, the idea of calculating metrics for citations of journal article publications is likely an area of hot topic. Deciding where to submit your work for publication is always a question of balancing out a variety of different factors (unless Science or Nature happens to snap it up, then really there is not much to decide is there? Except maybe -where- do you celebrate your noteworthy success?). One of the factors that determines where you submit inevitably replies on the metrics associated with that particular journal title. Does it have a high H-index? What is it's Impact Factor and Eigenfactor? What is the SJR... wait, the what?

Similar to the more traditionally used Impact Factor, the Scimago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator ranks journals based on the prestige of the journal within its respective field.  Similarly to the EigenFactor, the SJR is based on the Google PageRank algorithm (Guerro-Bote and Moya-Angelon, 2012).  According to creators of the SJR, Geurro-Bote and Moya-Angelon (2012), one of the superior features of using SJR is that it is size-independent which allows for a comparison of two journals of different size without the tendency for a larger journal to automatically be more prestigious.

So where can one go to find out the SJR of your favourite dental journal?  The Scimago Journal and Country Rank website uses information from the multidisciplinary article database Scopus to calculate SJR rankings using articles dating from 1996 onwards.  Not only can you compare journals from different disciplines using SJR but you can also compare the SJR of different regions of the world.

Under the "Journal Rankings" tab you can generate a list of journals within a specific discipline (such as oral surgery). This list is produced with the journal of the highest SJR on the top.  You can also limit by geographic region.

Under the "Compare" tab, you can compare multiple journal titles in fields such as: SJR, Total Cites, Total References, References/Document, Percent Cited, International Collaboration and many more. This information is displayed in quick-to-interpret graphs with information dating back to 1999.

So next time you are thinking about which journal might be the most prestigious in your field of research, why not some journal titles through the Scimago Journal and Country Rank website and see how they say the journals stack up.

Guerro-Bote, V.P., & Moya-Anegon, F. (2012). A further step forward in measuring journals' scientific prestige: The SJR2 indicator. Journal of Infometrics, 6, 674-688.