The best indication of a journal's quality is its ranking in a particular field of study. This can be expressed either as a quartile (e.g. Q1) or a position rank (e.g. 5/206).
Quartiles
- Q1: top 25% journals, 0.0-0.25 (highest ranked journals)
- Q2: top 50% journals, 0.25-0.5
- Q3: top 75% journals, 0.5-0.75
- Q4: bottom 25% journals, greater than 0.75 (lowest ranked journals)
See Clarivate Journal Citation Reports: Quartile rankings and other metrics for more information.
The following tools can be used to find a journal's quartile or ranking.
Finding the quartile for a specific journal:
- Enter the journal name in the search box
- Find the relevant journal from the results list
- Scroll down to Quartiles
- Hover over the coloured tiles to reveal the quartile.
Finding highest ranked journals in a specific field:
- Click "Journal rankings" in the website header
- Choose the subject areas, subject category, region (if applicable), and publication type in the drop-down menu
- View the list to see the journals that are most highly ranked.
- When you are in Scopus, go to Sources on the top menu
- Search by Title, Subject area, publisher, or ISSN
- Select the relevant journal and scroll down to CiteScore rank to see the rank and quartile.
- Search for the title of the journal, ISSN, category, publisher or country
- When you have found the journal scroll down Rank by Journal Impact Factor to see the rank and quartile.
Things to consider
- avoid comparing across platforms as they each use different calculations
- aim for high ranking journals (Q1 or top 25%)
- check for ranking consistency across several years (Note: you will not be able to do this if the journal is new)
- a journal may have a different ranking or quartile for different subject areas, check that the journal is highly ranked in your subject area.
