Metrics
A comprehensive suite of metrics embedded throughout Scopus is designed to help facilitate evaluation and provide a better view of your research interests. Whether you are looking for metrics at the journal, article or author level, Scopus combines its sophisticated analytical capabilities with its unbiased and broad content coverage to help you build valuable insights.
Journal metrics
Whether you are an author investigating where to submit your paper, an editor evaluating your journal’s performance or a librarian reviewing the impact of your investments, it is important to know how journals compare to each other. The compare journals feature in Scopus offers a more complete analysis of the journal landscape. Select up to 10 journals to upload into graphs for comparative analysis. You can compare on a variety of metrics including:
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR): SCImago Journal Rank is a prestige metric based on the idea that not all citations are the same. With SJR, the subject field, quality and reputation of the journal have a direct effect on the value of a citation. Learn more
Impact per Publication (IPP): Measures the ratio of citations per article published in a journal. Unlike the standard impact factor, the IPP metric uses a three year citation window, widely considered to be the optimal time period to accurately measure citations in most subject fields. Learn more
Source-Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP): Measures contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field. The impact of a single citation is given higher value in subject areas where citations are less likely, and vice versa. Learn more
Additionally, you can compare total number of citations received per year, total number of documents published per year, the percentage of documents each year that have never been cited, and the percentage of documents published in the year that are review articles.
Article-level metrics
Article-level metrics (ALMs) quantify the reach and impact of published research. Scopus incorporates data from new sources (such as social media mentions) along with traditional measures (such as citations) to present a richer picture of an individual article’s impact. Article-level metrics in Scopus include:
Citations: A well-established measure of research impact as a citation can mean recognition or validation of one's research by others. Scopus data includes over 57 million indexed records from over 5,000 publishers—including 2.6 million pre-1996 records— to ensure quality and reliable citation counts.
Readership: As a complement to traditional citation metrics, Mendeley readership can demonstrate alternative types of academic influence. In Scopus, Mendeley readership statistics show you the total number of Mendeley users who have downloaded an article to their library, followed by a breakdown of that group by discipline, academic status and country of origin. Learn more
Alternative metrics: Altmetric.com has been integrated into Scopus as a powerful third party web application that runs within the sidebar of Scopus abstract pages. The Altmetric.com box appears when an article is mentioned in social media, which provides another way to measure impact promptly after publication. Learn more
Author metrics
Scopus bibliometrics can help you assess an individual author’s research output and scholarly impact. The depth and breadth of content in Scopus—which includes 2.5 million pre-1996 records—provides the quality data needed to build accurate measurements of an author’s impact. With Scopus you can easily analyze and track an individual’s citation history. In addition to finding an author’s total citation and document counts from an author’s details page, you can also access the following metrics and tools:
h-index and h-graph: Rates a scientist's performance based on his or her career publications, as measured by the lifetime number of citations each article receives. The measurement depends on both quantity (number of publications) and quality (number of citations) of an academic's publications.
Citation overview tracker: An adjustable table that includes the number of times each document has been cited per publication year.
Analyze author output: A collection of in-depth and visual analysis tools designed to provide a better picture of an individual’s publication history and influence.