BioMed Central Blog

Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases ranked highly by new 'SNIP' citation metric

Henk Moed at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University has recently developed a new journal indicator, the Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), based on citation data from Scopus. A journal’s SNIP can be thought of as similar to a normalized Impact Factor, which weights citations to adjust for the fact that some fields are more citation-rich than others. The intention is that SNIPs will allow more effective comparison of journals between different fields.  More information about SNIPs and how they are calculated can be found  in Moed’s recent article and at www.journalindicators.com.

Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases is BioMed Central’s highest-ranking journal based on the SNIP metric, with a value of 1.31 (the median SNIP for the ~17,000 journals in Scopus is 0.52). This places the journal in the top 4% of all journals listed in Scopus. For comparison, the journal's Impact Factor of 3.14 makes it the 22nd most highly-rated BioMed Central journal by Impact Factor. The contrast between these two rankings demonstrates that caution is needed when interpreting citation metrics, as much depends on the algorithm used. The SNIP provides a valuable new means to identify high quality journals in fields which may not in general be highly cited. 

Other BioMed Central journals which are ranked particularly highly by the SNIP metric include:

Posted by Charlotte Hubbard at 03:39    Comments (0)