Communication Studies, Department of
Date of this Version
2011
Document Type
Article
Abstract
The degree to which a scholar’s work is cited by others has been regarded as an indicator of its scientific impact relative to other researchers in the web of scholarly communications. Likewise, various metrics based on citation counts have been developed to evaluate the impact of scholarly journals. Recently there has emerged a new research trend aimed at developing impact metrics that consider not only “the raw number of citations received by a scientific agent, but also the importance or influence of the actors who issue those citations.” These new metrics represent scientific impact as a function not of just the quality of citations received but of a combination of the quality and the quantity. For example, the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator, which has been developed by the SCImago Research Group headed by Professor Felix de Moya, and launched in December 2007, is a size-independent, web-based metric aimed at measuring the current "average prestige per paper" of journals. This indicator shows the visibility of the journals contained in the Scopus database.
Comments
Published in Measuring Scholarly Metrics, edited by Gordon R. Mitchell (Lincoln, NE: Oldfather Press, 2011). Copyright © 2011 Getachew Dinku Godana. Distributed under Creative Commons license.