The basics of journal-level metrics: What clinical researchers need to know

Abstract

Journal prestige is the most important factor for an initial manuscript submission. The authors use various journal-level metrics, commonly provided by the citation databases Web of Science and Scopus, as criteria for identifying a reputable journal. However, no single metric can serve as a perfect assessment of a journal’s value. This article summarizes the main journal- level metrics (Journal Impact Factor, Journal Citation Indicator, CiteScore, and their respective percentiles), in addition to other complementary and less applied metrics. It also highlights the distinction between impact metrics and normalized metrics, using examples from Spanish journals in the area of Internal Medicine.

Keywords

• Journal impact factor. Bibliometrics. Internal medicine.