A 2013 Report from the National Communication Association and Communication Councils Association
Additionally, the CCA report suggested that "Many alternative metrics offer greater coverage of the Communication academic literature while also tracking and reporting on citation patterns."
List of 105 communication journals compiled by the NCA in 2012 ( with 2011 Impact Factors)
Journal Impact Factors are released annually by Thomson Reuters' Journal Citation Reports – InCites
Within a given research field, journals with higher Impact Factors are thought to be more influential than journals with lower Impact Factors. The magnitude of Impact Factors varies substantially across different research fields.
Caveat: Only journals in the sciences and social sciences that meet Thomson Reuters standards for inclusion in the Web of Science Core Collection are assigned impact factors. Impact factors are not computed for journals in the humanities.
On going Debate: Currently impact factors are the most widely known way to rank journals, however they are controversial. Some people believe that impact factors do not accurately reflect the impact of a journal or article. (Activation Energy Blog, Oct. 22, 2015)
Google Scholar Metrics is designed to help authors "gauge the visibility and influence of recent articles in scholarly publications." Towards that goal, Google Scholar Metrics assigns publications a variety of rankings based upon Google's h-index.
H-index is based on h-core, which "is a set of top cited h articles from" a given publication. "The h-median is a measure of the distribution of citations to the h-core articles." Search results display h-index and h-median scores for publications based on the last 5 complete calendar years.
For more information on the methodology and data sources behind the rankings, see Google Scholar Metrics Questions? page.
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicators are released annually at Scimago Labs www.scimagojr.com (free). The underlying data come from Scopus.
The SJR indicator is inspired by Google's PageRank algorithm. A journal's SJR indicator is a measure of the number of citations received by its articles considering the importance of the journals where those citations came from. It is intended to measure journal prestige as opposed to journal popularity.
Calculation of the SJR measure was recently modified; average SJR is now equal to 1, which means that journals with SJRs higher than 1 are more prestigious than average.
The Impact per Publication (IPP) measures the ratio of citations in a year (Y) to scholarly papers published in the three previous years (Y-1, Y-2, Y-3) divided by the number of scholarly papers published in those same years (Y-1, Y-2, Y-3). The Impact per Publication metric is using a citation window of three years which is considered to be the optimal time period to accurately measure citations in most subject fields. Taking into account the same peer-reviewed scholarly papers only in both the numerator and denominator of the equation provides a fair impact measurement of the journal and diminishes the change of manipulation.
The Source Normalized Inpact per Paper (SNIP) measures contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field. The impact of a single citation is given higher value in subject areas where citations are less likely, and vice versa. SNIP is defined as the ratio of a journal's raw impact per publication and the citation potential in its subject field. This allows for evaluation of a journal compared to its competition and provides more contextual information, giving a better picture of the impact depending on the citation behavior in the field. A journal's SNIP = (citation count per paper)/(citation potential within its field).
