It is not always necessary to produce tables ranking a journal against other journals to measure their performance. There are many other ways of assessing the development of a journal by tracking its own trends over time.

Scopus is invaluable for such analyses, supporting citation analysis from 1996 over any number of years that is appropriate to the question being addressed. Our Editors have complimentary access to Scopus via Elsevier Editorial System (EES). For more information about this, please visit www.info.scopus.com/ees.

Scopus Journal Analyzer

The Scopus Journal Analyzer allows simultaneous comparison of data from up to 10 of the more than 15,000 peer-reviewed journals, back to 1996. The Scopus Journal Analyzer is updated every two months. The Scopus Journal Analyzer gives easy access to an objective and transparent overview of the performance of a journal and its competitors’ journals over time. This can help to analyze and manage journals more effectively, identify new growth areas and set out a strategy to improve performance. The aspects of the journals that are illustrated are: total citations received by each journal per year; documents published by each journal per year; and citations received per year (regardless of the year of publication of the cited document) divided by documents published per year. These trend analyses allow field-specific and up-to-date comparisons, as illustrated below. More information about the Scopus Journal Analyzer is available at http://info.scopus.com/journalanalyzer/.   Total Citations

Article and issue types

Evaluating differences between average citations per item type, and/or per article in distinct issue types, may raise points for consideration when setting the future strategy of a journal.

Review articles are, on average, cited three-times more frequently than original research articles; this is illustrated in our Perspectives in Publishing paper. This is a useful benchmark for assessing the topicality of reviews published in a particular journal against an average item that it itself publishes.

Similarly, special/themed issues and supplements are often published with the aim of attracting citations at a higher rate than a regular issue.

Content citations

Key content

For each journal, a particular level of citation can be assigned that indicates a ‘key article’. The number of years over which incoming citations are counted, and the level at which an article begins to be considered ‘key’, will vary per subject area and/or journal.

The proportion of journal content that is ‘key’ can indicate improvements in commissioning activities, in attracting the choicest research and/or authors, or in whatever activity(ies) have been undertaken to attract such content.

Content assessment by citations counted over varying time periods can be done very flexibly using the Scopus Citation Tracker.

Uncited content

High quality journal content, that is useful to a scientific community and that supports the development of the field, is generally indicated by citation inflow. It follows that a low proportion of content that is not cited is desirable, and reductions in the proportion of uncited material can indicate improvements in overall journal quality.

The time after which an article is considered uncited, and the desirable level of uncited content, will vary per journal and per field.