CiteScore: Elsevier's Free Journal Metric

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CiteScore is Elsevier’s free, Scopus-based journal-level citation metric, introduced in 2016 as a direct, no-subscription-required counterpart to Clarivate’s Journal Impact Factor (JIF). Anyone can look up a title’s CiteScore at scopus.com/sources without a Scopus subscription, whereas JIF requires access to Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports (JCR).

How it is calculated

Under the 2020 methodology, CiteScore counts citations received in year Y to documents published in years Y, Y-1, Y-2 and Y-3, divided by the number of those same documents — a four-year citation/document window, using the broader Scopus set of document types (not a narrower ‘citable items’ subset) as both the citing and cited universe. This is a deliberately wider window than JIF’s traditional two-year calculation (citations in year Y to items published in Y-1 and Y-2), which is one reason the same journal’s CiteScore and JIF figures are not directly comparable — see Journal Impact Factor for JIF’s own mechanics, and the CiteScore vs. Impact Factor comparison for a fuller side-by-side.

CiteScore vs. SJR and SNIP: three Scopus-derived metrics, only one from Elsevier

CiteScore is easily confused with two other Scopus-derived journal metrics that are, despite appearing alongside it on Scopus source pages, not Elsevier products: SJR (SCImago Journal Rank) is produced independently by the SCImago Research Group using a PageRank-style prestige weighting, and SNIP (Source-Normalized Impact per Paper) is calculated by CWTS at Leiden University specifically to correct for cross-field citation-rate differences. CiteScore is the only one of the three that Elsevier itself calculates. See the CiteScore vs. SJR comparison for the practical difference this makes when comparing journals across fields.

Why responsible-assessment guidance flags it

Like JIF, CiteScore is a journal-level average and inherits the same statistical critique when misapplied to an individual article or researcher: citation counts within a journal are highly skewed, so a journal’s average says little about any one paper’s likely citation performance. DORA and CoARA both name journal-level metrics generally — not CiteScore specifically, but the critique applies equally — as inappropriate proxies for the quality of individual research or researchers in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.

References

Elsevier, ‘CiteScore metrics’ methodology (scopus.com/sources).
James C. et al., ‘CiteScore metrics: Creating journal metrics from the Scopus citation index’, Learned Publishing 32(4), 2019.

Use in your systems

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CiteScore