publications - Which quantitative metrics are there of the quality and prestige of journals, and how do they compare?

I have seen several different metrics that are applied for ranking journals: Impact Factor, SJR, and H-index. Which of these is the most useful and robust for comparisons with respect to the quality and prestige of journals?

Answer

In short:

• Impact factor is the traditional measure of mean citations per year shortly after publication. It can refer to either the official Thomson-Reuters computation (which has lots of problems), or other competing similar computations.


• SJR attempts to improve on impact factor by using an algorithm like PageRank to more heavily weight citations from "better" publication venues.


• H-index for journals is just the same as for people, essentially looking for the volume of consistently good work. The only large place I know of that applies this to journals is Google Scholar metrics.

All of these are subject to manipulation and gaming, all are highly field-dependent, and none are very good actual ratings of quality. Still, they can be used to get a rough sense of the significance of a venue that you are unfamiliar with.