There are a variety of journal ranking or metrics options available. The Walden University Library does not specifically endorse or recommend any one ranking method or website over other available options. Comparing results from more than one metric may provide a better picture of the real impact of a journal.
NOTE: The Walden Library is unable to provide technical support for Google Scholar Metrics or Eigenfactor Journal Rankings.
Google Scholar Metrics collects citation data on articles published in scholarly journals to determine that journal’s influence and importance. The more articles that are cited from a journal will raise that journal’s ranking. This can help authors decide where they would like to publish their research.
Google Scholar has expanded their metrics to include highly cited articles which they call “Classic Papers.” Google Scholar describes these papers as "the ten most-cited articles that were published ten years earlier." Classic papers include research articles written in English for a variety of research fields.
Google Scholar metrics provides the h5-index, h5-core, and h5-median of included journals. Journals that are included must meet Google Scholar's inclusion guidelines. Journals that have published less than 100 articles or have received no citations between 2014 and 2018 (inclusively) are not included, as well as court opinions, patents, books, and dissertations.
Please note that journals ranked by Google Scholar Metrics cannot be used when providing evidence of journal indexing to Research Dissemination Support at Walden. For more information, please see the Office of Research and Doctoral Services’s Office of Research and Sponsored Programs website.
The Eigengactor project provides three types of rankings, which are all freely available at their website Eigenfactor.org:
They have a Cost Effectiveness search that ranks journals by scholarly output in relation to their cost. They also evaluate citations only from the past 5 years, since early citations can be misleading.
This ranking is designed to measure the total influence of a scholarly journal by not only measuring the number of citations, using data from Thomson Scientific's Journal Citation Reports (JCR), but also evaluating the influence of the journals where those citing articles are being published.
The Article Influence is the ranking of a journal based on the influence of the articles that journal publishes. This is determined by dividing the journal's Eigenfactor by the number of articles published in the journal. The mean score is 1.00, meaning that a journal with an Article Influence score of 1.20 means that each article in that journal has an above average influence.
This score expresses the Eigenfactor by regaging it so it is easier to read. It makes the mean score 1, so a journal with a normalized Eigenfactor of 2 has twice as much influence as the mean journals. It is calculated by taking a journal's Eigenfactor score, multiplying it by the number of journals in the JCR for that year, and then dividing by 100.
The Journal Ranking page may include the name of the journal and ISSN, the Eignfactor Number (EF); Article Influence number (AI) and the Normalized Eigenfactor number (EFn). Additional information about the journal, such as publisher, cost, number of articles published, etc. Graphs showing article influence and cost effectiveness of the journal are included.
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