The H Index is a metric which attempts to measure both productivity and impact. It can be applied at the journal, author or article level. H indexes are available via the databases Scopus and Web of Science. The websites Scimago and Google Scholar also provides H indexes for journals quite easily. The H index measure was created in 2005 by JE Hirsch in an article published in PNAS. One essentially looks at where the number of articles published and the number of citations per article cross on a graph - so a journal with an H Index of 100 has at least 100 article each cited at least 100 times.
Advantages of H-Index:
Disadvantage of H-Index:
The Scopus database works well to calculate H Indexes for small and moderate sized journals. It cannot calculate on the fly for more than about 2000 articles. If the journal you are interested in has more articles than that you'll need to go to another source. Below are the steps to calculate a journal H Index.
From the main search page:
Alternatively you can calculate an H5 Index, which is the H Index for the past 5 full years. So long as this is done for every journal title being considered it should be equally as illuminating as the full H Index.
Google Scholar indexes many kinds of scholarly information including journal articles, books and book chapters, conference proceedings, dissertations, teaching materials, etc. GS provides an H5 Index for most journals (H index for the most recent 5 full years) and also offers subject categories, ranking journals listed within each category.. To check a journal's H5 Index follow these steps:
The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a publicly available portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus database. To find a journal's H Index in Scimago follow these steps:
The results will provide the H Index plus a lot of additional information about your journal. Because the ranking is based on information from the Scopus database it should be analogous to Scopus H Index rankings and is more easily obtained because it is calculated for all years, not just the H5 Index which must sometimes be used in Scopus for large journals.