Introduction and comparative study of the new scientific journals citation indicators in Journal Citation Reports and Scopus

The evaluation of scientific journals with bibliometric indicators has been dominated by the Impact factor since the 70s. However Thomson has recently included in the Journal Citation Reports the Eigen factor and the Article influence score. On the other hand Elsevier has included in Scopus the Source normalized impact per paper (SNIP) and the SCImago journal rank (SJR). In this paper we introduce, and describe these indicators. Secondly to study the similarities we analyze correlations of the traditional indicators and the new ones, detailing the results across 27 scientific fields. It was noted that some couples of indicators such as Eigen Citations, Impact factor-ArticleScore, Impact factor SJR and SJR-ArticleScore do correlate in many areas. Correlations showed different trends in Science and Social science; therefore, in the last section we discuss the need to take into account the scientific area when selecting an indicator.