Writing in the Natural Sciences: H-Index, Citation Metrics

Journal Influence/impact and Where should I publish?

There used to be one primary way to measure the influence of a journal but through the magic of informatics several ways are now available to you. 

• Search Jane (Journal/Author Name Estimator) for suggestions on where to publish your article (The Biosemantics Group)
  • The developers of this site provide several critical pieces of information including: 
    • Article Influence (AI) indicator: based on how often articles from that journal are cited within the 1st five years of publication  
    • A blue bar that indicates the percentage of journals that are indexed by PubMed with lower AIs
    • Open Access and PubMed Central open access status
•  Eigenfactor & Article Influence (free)
  • Article Influence (AI): based on how often articles from that journal are cited within the 1st five years of publication
• Journal Citation Reports (ISI/Web of Science; impact factors of journals)
•  SCImago Journal & Country Rank 
  •  Includes data from Scopus (H-index) and other ways of ranking/scoring journals.

Wikipedia defines the h-index as:

an index that attempts to measure both the scientific productivity and the apparent scientific impact of a scientist. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other people's publications. The index can also be applied to the productivity and impact of a group of scientists, such as a department or university or country. The index was suggested by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at UCSD, as a tool for determining theoretical physicists' relative quality and is sometimes called the Hirsch index or Hirsch number.