SCImago, a data-mining and visualisation group at the universities of Granada, Extremadura, Carlos III and Alcalá de Henares, Spain, recently launched the SCImago Journal & Country Rank database. The new Internet database lets users generate on-the-fly citation statistics of published research papers for free. It ranks journals and countries using such citation metrics as the Hirsch Index. Also, it includes a new metric - the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR).
The tool calculates papers' impact factors using a new algorithm similar to PageRank, the algorithm used by Google to rank web pages. What differentiates SJR from Google's PageRank is that SJR uses a citation window of three years. The open-access database is reportedly collaborating with STM publisher Elsevier and its underlying data from Scopus, a subscription abstracts database created by Elsevier in 2004.
The familiar impact factor created by industry leader Thomson Scientific is calculated as the average number of citations by the papers that each journal contains. The SJR also analyses the citation links between journals in a series of iterative cycles.
According to experts, it will be difficult to compare the results of SJR journal analyses directly with those based on impact factors, as each is based on different databases. Thomson's Web of Science abstracts database covers around 9,000 journals and Scopus more than 15,000, and in the years covered by the SCImago database - 1996 to 2007 - Scopus contains 20-45 percent more records.
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