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Research Assessment and Impact

This guide provides information about crafting impact statements and using metrics or other evidence to showcase research performance.

Considerations

  • An article published in what is considered a highly ranked journal may not get cited. Alternatively, the article could be considered very influential (with many citations), but was published in what is considered a low ranked journal.
  • Journals may take 3-5 years before gaining a ranking.
  • An entity could be an institution, a research group or an individual researcher.

CiteScore

  • is based on the number of citations of a scholarly work in a journal over over four years, divided by the number of the same document types indexed in Scopus and published in the same four years by that journal
  • are calculated once a year, do not change over the year, and are suited to reporting a journal's citation impact
  • is not comparable across journals in different disciplines
  • suggested sources: Scopus and SciVal

Scimago Journal Ranking (SJR)

  • is based on the concept of a transfer of prestige between journals via their citation links
  • offers field normalisation for cross-disciplinary benchmarking
  • offers quartile rankings (high to low quality) starting at Q1 (green), Q2 (yellow), Q3 (orange) and finishing with Q4 (red) for journals in its database
  • suggested sources: Scopus, SciVal and Scimago.

Source-Normalised Impact per Paper (SNIP)

  • offers field normalisation for cross-disciplinary benchmarking
  • scores are the ratio of a source's average citation count and 'citation potential' (citation potential is measured as the number of citations that a journal would be expected to receive for its subject field).
  • suggested sources: Scopus and SciVal

Publications in top journal percentiles

  • indicates the extent to which an entity's research outputs are present in the most-cited journals in a database source (e.g., in the top 1%, 5% or 10% of the most cited journals). It is common to benchmark against the top 10%.
  • calculating the percentage is preferred when comparing entities of different sizes
  • offers field normalisation for cross-disciplinary benchmarking
  • suggested source: SciVal.

Journal Impact Factor (JIF)

  • is a feature of InCites, a Clarivate proprietary product that JCU does not subscribe to. However, limited information is available to the JCU community by viewing journal details in Web of Science database.
  • is not comparable across disciplines.

Metric sources at JCU

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