Elsevier's Scopus Partners With CWTS and SCImago to Offer Multidimensional Evaluation of Research Journals

Metrics to be Powered by Scopus and Freely Available Online

AMSTERDAM, January 26 - Elsevier, a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical
and medical information products and services, today
announced that its flagship product Scopus has successfully partnered with
the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) and the SCImago Research
Group, endorsing two complementary journal metrics, SNIP and SJR. The metrics
will be freely available online at www.journalmetrics.com, and
integrated into Scopus, allowing researchers around the world to analyze
journals within the abstract and citation database. The indicators will offer
a greater currency and flexibility in journal performance measurement than
any single-metric method currently available.

SNIP, which stands for Source Normalized Impact per Paper, measures a
journal's contextual citation impact and was developed by CWTS. 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.

SJR stands for SCImago Journal Rank, and was developed by the SCImago
Research Group. It 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.

Putting SNIP and SJR side by side and applying them to the breadth and
depth of the Scopus database, which covers the greatest number of journal
titles including local language titles from developed and emerging countries,
the new offering represents the most inclusive bibliometric analytics
available for journals. Their integration 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 for
Elsevier. "We are pleased to have the opportunity to partner with CWTS and
SCImago to power the next level of bibliometric analysis. 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," added Professor
Henk F. Moed, currently a senior staff member with CWTS in the Department of
Social Sciences at Leiden University who will be joining Elsevier as a senior
scientific advisor next month. "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. We hope to further expand the number of metrics working alongside each
other in the future."

"By aligning our SJR indicator with SNIP and leveraging the coverage
breadth and depth of Scopus, we are confident that the outcome is the most
complete bibliometric analysis available today," stated Professor Felix de
Moya Anegon of the Centre for Human and Social Sciences (CCHS) of the Spanish
National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid and director of SCImago. "We're
also excited by the new opportunity this creates for community-generated
ranking systems that more closely meet market needs and draw a more accurate
picture of research output."

The journal metrics will be updated twice annually and made available to
Scopus subscribers at www.scopus.com and to non-Scopus users at
www.journalmetrics.com free of charge. Additional information on the
SJR and SNIP indicators is available through the following recent
publications:

    - "Measuring contextual citation impact of scientific journals", Henk
    Moed, Creator of SNIP (arxiv.org/abs/0911.2632)

    - "The SJR indicator: A new indicator of journals' scientific prestige",
    BorjaGonzalez-Pereira, Vicente Guerrero-Bote, Felix Moya-Anegon
    (arxiv.org/abs/0912.4141)

About Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS)

CWTS is a research institute at Leiden University specializing in the
measurement of research and technological performance, mapping of science and
the study of the science-technology interface. CWTS BV is a knowledge company
dedicated to bibliometric and related information products primarily
developed at the CWTS institute.

The CWTS institute and CWTS BV together form a symbiotic organisation in
which each part benefits from the achievements of the other. The knowledge
base is built primarily in the institute, while products usually find their
way through CWTS BV.

About SCImago Research Group

SCImago is a research group dedicated to information analysis,
representation and retrieval by means of visualisation techniques.

About Scopus.com

Covering the world's research literature, Scopus.com is the largest
abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web
sources with smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research. Its unique
database contains abstracts and references from 18,000 titles from more than
5,000 publishers worldwide, ensuring broad interdisciplinary coverage. In
addition, Scopus not only offers users citation information about the
articles covered, but also integrates web and patent searches directly from
its clean and simple interface. Direct links to full-text articles, library
resources and other applications like reference management software, make
Scopus quicker, easier and more comprehensive to use than any other
literature research tool. For more information about Scopus please visit
www.info.scopus.com

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and
medical information products and services. The company works in partnership
with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000
journals, including The Lancet (www.thelancet.com) and Cell
(www.cell.com), and close to 20,000 book titles, including major
reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions
include ScienceDirect (www.sciencedirect.com), Scopus
(www.scopus.com), Reaxys (www.reaxys.com), MD Consult
(www.mdconsult.com) and Nursing Consult
(www.nursingconsult.com), which enhance the productivity of science
and health professionals, and the SciVal suite (www.scival.com)
and MEDai's Pinpoint Review (www.medai.com), which help research and
health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.

A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier (
www.elsevier.com) employs 7,000 people worldwide. The company is part
of Reed Elsevier Group PLC (www.reedelsevier.com), a world-leading
publisher and information provider, which is jointly owned by Reed Elsevier
PLC and Reed Elsevier NV. The ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam),
REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

    Deanna Decker
    Jessica Disch
    Phone: +1-212-752-8338
    E-mail: ddecker@psbpr.com
            jdisch@psbpr.com

Deanna Decker, Jessica Disch, Phone: +1-212-752-8338, E-mail: ddecker at psbpr.com, jdisch at psbpr.com