Like Journal Impact Factor, The CiteScore is a Ratio.
The CiteScore represents the number of articles cited in the current year, divided by the total number of published documents (articles, reviews, conference papers, book chapters, and data papers) in the journal during the previous three-year period. The higher the number the “better” the score.
To find the CiteScore of a journal, you'll need to log in to Scopus using your Case Single-Sign-On (SSO):
When you're at Scopus, you will see a few things that ensure your credentials are working. The first, at the upper left, will tell you that access to Scopus is provided by Case Western Reserve University. Another will be your personal credentials in the icon at the upper right (TH). (If this is your first time using Scopus you should create a personal account, which will allow you to save searches to your personal account for access at a future date, or to allow alerts for any searches you save.)
To find the CiteScore in Scopus, click on the Sources link above and to the right of the main search box. On the Sources page, for a known title, select the Title option from the drop down menu and type in your source Title.
From the results screen, click on the title of the journal. This will take you to the Source Details page, which will provide the current CiteScore, the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), and the Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP). You'll also find the Scopus indexing information, the journal publisher, the ISSN and E-ISSN, the subject area, and the Source type.
The SJR assigns "weights to bibliographic citations based on the importance of the journals that issued them so that citations issued by more important journals will be more valuable than those issued by less important ones."
The 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.
Journals are also given a Rank in their respective Category and a Percentile rank, so NEJM is ranked #2 in General Medicine and is in the 99th Percentile.
Searching by Subject Category can help if you are looking to find the best journal to publish your article or which journals are best positioned within a sub-category of a larger field.
To search by Subject, go to the Sources page and select Subject Area from the drop down menu.
The search results for the Subject search will show the titles arranged by CiteScore, from highest to lowest.
