SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)

SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) is a free, publicly available journal-prestige indicator produced by the SCImago Research Group (a joint initiative of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas and the University of Granada, Spain) and published via scimagojr.com, using citation data licensed from Elsevier's Scopus database. A journal's SJR score is not a simple citation count or average -- it is computed with an iterative, PageRank-style algorithm that redistributes 'prestige' across the citation network so that a citation from a higher-prestige journal counts for more than a citation from a lower-prestige one. The calculation uses a 3-year citation window (citations received in year Y to documents published in years Y-1, Y-2, and Y-3), and caps journal self-citation at a maximum of 33% of a journal's total outgoing references so a journal cannot inflate its own score by citing itself. SCImago also publishes each journal's placement into quartiles (Q1-Q4) within its Scopus subject category, which is what most researchers use day to day to gauge a journal's relative standing among its direct peers.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 23 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A researcher choosing between two similarly-ranked journals in the same Scopus subject category checks each journal's SJR indicator and Q1-Q4 quartile placement on scimagojr.com -- both are published free, with no subscription needed, unlike Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports.

Is an instance

A journal that receives relatively few citations overall, but whose citations come disproportionately from other highly-cited, high-prestige journals in its field, can post a higher SJR than a journal with more raw citations drawn mostly from low-prestige sources -- because SJR weights the source of a citation, not just its existence.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

A journal's raw Scopus citation count or CiteScore is not the same figure as its SJR -- CiteScore is an unweighted average (citations over a 4-year window divided by documents published in that window, with every citation counted equally regardless of the citing journal's standing), while SJR applies the prestige-weighting algorithm described above. The two can, and often do, rank the same pair of journals differently.

What SCImago Journal Rank measures

SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) is a journal-level metric intended to capture a journal’s prestige, not simply how many citations it accumulates. It was developed by the SCImago Research Group and is published free of charge at scimagojr.com, alongside country- and institution-level rankings built from the same underlying data. The data source is Scopus, Elsevier’s abstracting and indexing database, which SCImago licenses to compute SJR — Scopus itself is a separate, competing index from Clarivate’s Web of Science, and SJR should not be confused with Clarivate’s own Journal Impact Factor (JIF), which is calculated from Web of Science data and published in Journal Citation Reports.

How the calculation differs from Journal Impact Factor

The core methodological difference between SJR and JIF is how each treats a citation. JIF is an unweighted ratio: total citations in year Y to items published in years Y-1 and Y-2, divided by the number of citable items in those two years. Every citation counts the same regardless of where it came from.

SJR instead uses an iterative, PageRank-style algorithm — the same family of algorithm Google originally used to rank web pages by the prestige of the pages linking to them. Each journal is assigned a ‘prestige’ score, and that prestige is redistributed across the citation network so that a citation from a higher-prestige journal transfers more value than a citation from a lower-prestige one. The algorithm iterates until the scores stabilize. Two further mechanics shape the result:

3-year citation window — SJR counts citations received in year Y to documents published in years Y-1, Y-2, and Y-3 (one year longer than the standard 2-year JIF window).
Self-citation cap — a journal’s own self-citations are capped at a maximum of 33% of its total outgoing references, limiting the extent to which a journal can inflate its own score by citing itself.

The practical effect: a journal can rank differently on SJR than on JIF or CiteScore, because SJR is answering a different question — not just ‘how many citations,’ but ‘citations from how prestigious a source.’ For a side-by-side walkthrough of both metrics on the same journal, see Impact Factor vs. SJR.

SJR vs. CiteScore

SJR is also frequently compared to CiteScore, which is Elsevier’s own free Scopus-based metric. The two are easy to conflate because they draw on the same underlying Scopus citation data, but they are calculated differently: CiteScore is an unweighted average over a 4-year citation window (every citation counts equally, regardless of source), while SJR applies the prestige-weighting algorithm described above over a 3-year window. A journal’s SJR and CiteScore figures, and their relative ranking against peer journals, will often diverge for exactly this reason.

Quartiles and how researchers use SJR

Alongside the numeric SJR indicator, SCImago publishes each journal’s quartile (Q1, Q2, Q3, or Q4) within every Scopus subject category it is classified under — Q1 being the top 25% of journals in that category by SJR, Q4 the bottom 25%. Because a journal can be classified into more than one Scopus subject category, it can hold a different quartile in each. This quartile ranking is widely used in journal-selection decisions, promotion and tenure review, and research-assessment exercises in some countries, though standards bodies including the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Leiden Manifesto caution against using any single journal-level metric — SJR, CiteScore, or JIF — as a proxy for the quality of an individual article or researcher.

Access and cost

Unlike Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports, which requires an institutional subscription, SJR and its underlying journal, country, and institution rankings are published free and openly at scimagojr.com, making it a commonly used no-cost reference point even at institutions without a Web of Science or JCR subscription.

Related terms

Use in your systems

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Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

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