We are pleased to announce the launch of Journal Scholar Metrics, a bibliometric tool where you’ll find Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences journals ranked by citation-based indicators, based on data from Google Scholar Metrics (GSM).
9,196 journals from 82 countries were identified. Nevertheless, we may have missed some A&H/SSCI journals due to the strict search limitations in GSM. Journals are grouped into 22 subject categories. In each subject category journals are sorted by their h5-index. At the moment we have excluded journals written in any alphabet other than Latin (Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Chinese, Korean, Hindi, Japanese…). It’s also worth remembering that currently, GSM only displays journals that have published at least 100 articles between 2010 and 2014, and have received at least one citation for those articles.
The main innovations of this product are:
- It’s the first time that all Arts & Humanities and Social Science journals in GSM are identified.
- It’s the first time the impact of journals according to Google Scholar is assessed excluding journal self-references (citations to a journal from that same journal)
- Two new indicators are presented: sum of citations of articles that contribute to the h5-index (including and excluding self-references), as well as the percentage of citations that are self-references. The h5-index including and excluding self-references is also displayed.
- We use a new classification system: journals are classified as core or related on a given subject category depending on the level to which they are linked to said subject category. To do this, we use the classification systems in other multidisciplinary and specialized bibliographic databases and journal directories.
- Results can be displayed by category, or by country of publication. It is also possible to apply a country filter to journals in a given category, and viceversa, thus enabling users to generate national rankings.
Details about the journals
Clicking on the title of a journal in any ranking will take you to the profile page of that journal. That page will show basic information for that journal, like:
- Name of the journal and country of publication.
- Impact Indicators: the same indicators that are shown in the ranking page.
- Subject categories to which the journal has been assigned, and position it occupies in the category: a journal may be assigned to more than one category. Additionally, if the journal has been considered a core journal in the category, you’ll see two different positions and quartiles. The first one (Only core journals) is the position and quartile the journal occupies in the category when only core journals are considered. The second one (All journals) is the position and quartile it occupies in the category when both core and related journals are considered. Otherwise, only the "All journals" position and quartile will appear.
Indexed in: this table presents a list of databases where this journal is also indexed, as well as the categories these databases have assigned to the journal, according to their respective classification schemes.
The subject category table also includes a radio button to the left of each of the category. This button, when clicked, will highlight all the related categories in the “Indexed in” table.
Below the navigation menu there is a box from which you’ll be able to search any journal that has been included in this product. When you select a journal, you will be taken to its profile page. Additionally, there is another search box in each of the country or subject rankings, where you can search journals included in the country or subject ranking you're currently browsing.
Lastly, we would like to stress the experimental nature of this tool, which is linked to our research line dedicated to test the capacity and performance of Google Scholar as a source of information for scientific evaluation. We are trying to surface what is hidden.
Specifically, the goal of this tool is to overcome the limitations of Google Scholar Metrics. In GSM, only top journals written in English are classified into subject categories (top 100 according to their h5-index), and only 20 journals are shown in each subcategory. Journals written in languages other than English (Chinese, Portuguese, German, Spanish, French, Korean, Japanese, Dutch, and Italian) aren’t classified in any subject category, and only the top 100 according to their h5-index are displayed in the language rankings. Therefore, the immense majority of journals in GSM (hidden behind a search feature that will only display 20 journals for any given query) isn’t classified in any subject category, nor is grouped by country or language of publication.
You may find more information on the website:
