Open Access Publishing: How to Determine a Journal Rating

The university administration has set a guideline that journals must be rated in the top 15% of its subject area by Scopus to receive financial support. These ratings are updated yearly and usually run on a four year cycle (i.e. they rate journals based on their performance over the last four years). This means that journals that are less than four years old are usually still unrated, even if they are very high quality. We always look at the last completed rating.

The steps to determine if a journal is rated in the top 15% is explained below.

Scopus

To check a journal's ranking in Scopus, follow these steps:

1. Go to Scopus from the library E-resources page
2. On the Scopus page, click "Sources" and enter the name of the journal that you are looking up.
   
3. Click on "Find Sources". When the search is complete, you should see your journal listed. Click on the title to display the detailed information. Scroll to the bottom of that page to see the "Citerank Score" for the most recent year.
   

In this case, you can see that Scopus has ranked "International Journal of Chemical Engineering" at the 48th percentile for the subject area of "General Chemical Engineering". Percentiles 99 to 85 are in the top 15%, and be eligible for payment.