Elsevier's Scopus Partners With CWTS and SCImago to Offer Multidimensional Evaluation of Research Journals

AMSTERDAM, January 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ --

- Metrics to be Powered by Scopus and Freely Available Online

Elsevier, a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced that its flagship product Scopus has successfully partnered with the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) and the SCImago Research Group, endorsing two complementary journal metrics, SNIP and SJR. The metrics will be freely available online at http://www.journalmetrics.com, and integrated into Scopus, allowing researchers around the world to analyze journals within the abstract and citation database. The indicators will offer a greater currency and flexibility in journal performance measurement than any single-metric method currently available.

SNIP, which stands for Source Normalized Impact per Paper, measures a journal's contextual citation impact and was developed by CWTS. It allows direct comparison of journals in different subject fields, by accounting for the frequency at which authors cite other papers, the speed of maturation of citation impact, and the extent to which the database covers the field's literature.

SJR stands for SCImago Journal Rank, and was developed by the SCImago Research Group. It is a measure of the scientific prestige of scholarly sources: value of weighted citations per document. A journal transfers its own 'prestige', or status, to another through the act of citing it. In effect, this means that a citation from a source with a relatively high SJR is worth more than a citation from a source with a lower SJR.

Putting SNIP and SJR side by side and applying them to the breadth and depth of the Scopus database, which covers the greatest number of journal titles including local language titles from developed and emerging countries, the new offering represents the most inclusive bibliometric analytics available for journals. Their integration helps to meet the evolving needs of the scientific community by providing current, flexible, transparent data to empower users to build their own tailored journal ranking systems.

"For many years, the scientific community has called for more accurate metrics that move beyond standard journal classification," said Niels Weertman, Director Scopus, Performance & Planning and Collaboration Tools for Elsevier. "We are pleased to have the opportunity to partner with CWTS and SCImago to power the next level of bibliometric analysis. Bringing a more nuanced approach, we hope to enhance research performance measurement."

"It's long been understood that no single journal metric can realistically address the needs of the research community," added Professor Henk F. Moed, currently a senior staff member with CWTS in the Department of Social Sciences at Leiden University who will be joining Elsevier as a senior scientific advisor next month. "Our challenge was to develop a more flexible system. Matching the strengths and weaknesses of one metric to another complementary metric, we were able to fill many of the existing analytical gaps. We hope to further expand the number of metrics working alongside each other in the future."

"By aligning our SJR indicator with SNIP and leveraging the coverage breadth and depth of Scopus, we are confident that the outcome is the most complete bibliometric analysis available today," stated Professor Felix de Moya Anegon of the Centre for Human and Social Sciences (CCHS) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid and director of SCImago. "We're also excited by the new opportunity this creates for community-generated ranking systems that more closely meet market needs and draw a more accurate picture of research output."

The journal metrics will be updated twice annually and made available to Scopus subscribers at http://www.scopus.com and to non-Scopus users at http://www.journalmetrics.com free of charge. Additional information on the SJR and SNIP indicators is available through the following recent publications:

    - "Measuring contextual citation impact of scientific journals", Henk
    Moed, Creator of SNIP (http://arxiv.org/abs/0911.2632)

    - "The SJR indicator: A new indicator of journals' scientific prestige",
    BorjaGonzalez-Pereira, Vicente Guerrero-Bote, Felix Moya-Anegon
    (http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.4141)

About Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS)

CWTS is a research institute at Leiden University specializing in the measurement of research and technological performance, mapping of science and the study of the science-technology interface. CWTS BV is a knowledge company dedicated to bibliometric and related information products primarily developed at the CWTS institute.

The CWTS institute and CWTS BV together form a symbiotic organisation in which each part benefits from the achievements of the other. The knowledge base is built primarily in the institute, while products usually find their way through CWTS BV.

About SCImago Research Group

SCImago is a research group dedicated to information analysis, representation and retrieval by means of visualisation techniques.

About Scopus.com

Covering the world's research literature, Scopus.com is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources with smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research. Its unique database contains abstracts and references from 18,000 titles from more than 5,000 publishers worldwide, ensuring broad interdisciplinary coverage. In addition, Scopus not only offers users citation information about the articles covered, but also integrates web and patent searches directly from its clean and simple interface. Direct links to full-text articles, library resources and other applications like reference management software, make Scopus quicker, easier and more comprehensive to use than any other literature research tool. For more information about Scopus please visit http://www.info.scopus.com

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The company works in partnership with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000 journals, including The Lancet (http://www.thelancet.com) and Cell (http://www.cell.com), and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com), Scopus (http://www.scopus.com), Reaxys (http://www.reaxys.com), MD Consult (http://www.mdconsult.com) and Nursing Consult (http://www.nursingconsult.com), which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the SciVal suite (http://www.scival.com) and MEDai's Pinpoint Review (http://www.medai.com), which help research and health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.

A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier ( http://www.elsevier.com) employs 7,000 people worldwide. The company is part of Reed Elsevier Group PLC (http://www.reedelsevier.com), a world-leading publisher and information provider, which is jointly owned by Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV. The ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

    Deanna Decker
    Jessica Disch
    Phone: +1-212-752-8338
    E-mail: [email protected]
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SOURCE Elsevier