The metrics will be freely available online at www.journalmetrics.com, and integrated into Scopus, allowing researchers around the world to analyse journals within the abstract and citation database. The indicators will offer a greater currency and flexibility in journal performance measurement, according to the STM publisher

Developed by CWTS, SNIP, (Source Normalised Impact per Paper), measures a journal's contextual citation impact. 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.

Whereas SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) 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.

The new offering, formed after integrating SNIP and SJR and applying them to Scopus database, represents the most inclusive bibliometric analytics available for journals. It 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, Elsevier. “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,” said Professor Henk Moed, from the department of Social Sciences at Leiden University.

He added: “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.”