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Open knowledge management in higher education
Edited by F J García-Peñalvo, C G de Figuerola and J A Merlo
The open access SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SJR ) database offers essential scientometric information for more than 17,000 scholarly and professional journals based on data licensed from Elsevier's Scopus database. These metrics include traditional as well as novel indicators for measuring publication productivity and prestige at the journal level for the past 13 years. They offer very informative new insights to complement those that have been provided by the subscription-based Journal Citation Reports (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.
Introduction
The open access SJR database was launched in 2007, and has been regularly updated twice a year with new data and new features. It is likely to encourage the development of further metrics and the relationships among them as suggested and practised by the most competent, highly active and innovative scientometricians ([6], [7] Egghe, 2006a, b; [26] Leydesdorff, 2009; [27] Martin, 1996; [29] Moed et al. , 1999; [28] Moed, 2009; [30] Rousseau and the STIMULATE 8 Group, 2009 - to name a few) realising that the best way to characterise the productivity and prestige of journals is through the combination of various measures and indicators simultaneously ([3] Bollen et al. , 2006).
This is considerably facilitated by the fact that the entire SJR data set can be downloaded in tab delimited format for direct import into any spreadsheet or database management software. (This generous option could be improved by providing the same export option for the additional data elements available on the Data page of the journals' records that are currently not included in the download format - especially the number of cited and uncited papers per year per journal (see Figure 1 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]c.)
The SJR database has already generated considerable interest ([8] Falagas et al.