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Academic Publishing 101

This guide will guide you through the process of publishing an article in an academic journal.

What is Scopus?

Scopus is a leading, interdisciplinary database that contains a wide variety of content including peer-reviewed articles, books, conference papers, and preprints covering the health sciences, life sciences, physical sciences, and social sciences. Scopus' system ties together the records of articles, authors, and institutions to make it easy to find publication metrics and other information for papers, people, and institutions.

Scopus has various features that will help you assess the impact of articles, journals, and authors. Check out the resources on this page to learn more.

Article Metrics

Articles-level metrics quantify the reach and impact of published research. Scopus using a combination of traditional metrics (like citation counts) and alternative metrics (such as social media mentions and downloads).

With Scopus document metrics, you can:

  • See citation overviews
  • Create graphs
  • Compare citation counts
  • Link to citing documents 

Journal Metrics

You can use journal metrics to get an understanding of how much impact a particular journal has in its field, usually measured by how often articles cite other articles from that journal. Note that journal metrics are only an indicator of citation and publication trends, and are not an indicator of journal or research quality.

Scopus provides three different types of metrics for journals:

CiteScore

CiteScore is based on the number of citations to documents in a journal over a four-year period, divided by the number of the same document types indexed in Scopus and published in those same four years. CiteScore is measured by discpline, and is designed to give an understanding of how valued a particular journal is in its given field/specialty.

SNIP 

SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper) measures contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field. The impact of a single citation is given higher value in subject areas where citations are less likely, and vice versa. 

SJR

SJR (Scimago Journal Rank), is based on analyzing a journals "prestige" by analyzing how journal articles cite one another. It work's similar to Google's algorithm, that assumes important websites are linked to from other important websites. SJR weights each incoming citation to a journal by the SJR of the citing journal, with a citation from a high-SJR source counting for more than a citation from a low-SJR source.

Author Metrics

Scopus' data makes it easy to identify your own, or another author's research metrics and impact. You can use Scopus to track an author's citation history, see how often and where they publish, and see trends in their publishing. Scopus's author metrics include a number of helpful features including:

h-index

Rates a scientist's performance based on his or her career publications, as measured by the lifetime number of citations each article receives. The measurement depends on both quantity (number of publications) and quality (number of citations) of an academic's publications. Note that the h-index is only a rough estimation of an author's publication and citation trends, and it not necessarily an indicator of research quality or significance.

Citation Overview Tracker

An adjustable table that includes the number of times each document has been cited per publication year. Helpful for understanding trends in your own articles' citations.

Analyze Author Output

Scopus provides a number of helpful data visualizations to give you an understanding of an author's publication history and citation trends.