Researchers use journal rankings for many purposes but mostly they use rankings to see the quality of research from a publisher, from an author or from an institution. There are many metrics in play when it comes to ranking journals but the most common methods rely on the premise that highly cited journals contain articles that cite other highly cited journals. As articles contained in journals are cited more frequently by others, their prestige increases as does their rankings. This is often referred to as the SJR
Over the years researchers have looked for other ways to rank a journal or journal article since once an article title is published it can take years to be cited by other researchers and generated data for rankings. Because of this citation lag they are developing other metrics. Plum Analytics analyzes social media platforms to find mentions of authors and their research. These types of social media postings happen quickly allowing us to rank the popularity of a journal, article and authors work in real time.
Journal listing resources allow the researcher to locate a specific title to see if it is current, locally held and even it if is well regarded in the field.
We have listed two: Journal Finder - the source the University uses as a searchable archive of our journal holdings. The other source called Cufts or TruSerial is a serial lookup tool that shows the researcher where a journal is indexed and if full-text is available.