Comparison of journal impact rankings in the SCImago Journal & Country Rank and the Journal Citation Reports databases

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to compare the journal impact rankings of the open access SCImago Journal & Country Rank ( SJR ) database and the subscription‐based Journal Citation Reports ( JCR ). Design/methodology/approach – The paper looks at the SJR database which offers essential scientometric information for more than 17,000 scholarly and professional journals based on data licensed from Elsevier's Scopus database and compares this with the JCR database. Findings – The open access SJR database offers very informative new insights to complement those that have been provided by the JCR for more than three decades by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and its successor, the Thomson (later Thomson‐Reuters) company. Especially valuable are its features of weighting the citations received based on the prestige of the citing journals, the (partial) exclusion of journal self‐citations, and the broader base of source journals. They provide new opportunities to analyse and understand their effects on the ranking of journals. Originality/value – The paper provides useful information on the open access SJR and JCR databases and their effects on the ranking of journals.