Scopus Citation Metrics for Top and Bottom Quintile Kinesiology-Related Journals

Abstract

ABSTRACT Journals are often ranked by citation metrics to classify them into ordinal categories (e.g. quartiles or quintiles) of prestige. This study compared five journal metrics and their associations for the top and bottom quintiles of a large sample of kinesiology-related journals. Top and bottom quintiles (n = 70) based on SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) for 2023 were identified. Descriptive data and associations between SJR, total documents, total citations, external citations per document, and percentage of uncited documents were calculated. All journal metrics in both quintiles were highly variable, and most were positively skewed. Most median metrics differed across quintiles by a factor of 3.6 to 7.8 times, although median total citations to top quintile journals were 30 times larger than bottom quintile journals due to more total documents in top quintile journals. Most (5 and 7) of the 10 associations between the journal metrics were significant (p < .01) for the top and bottom quintiles, respectively. Results confirm previous research that SJR is a positively skewed, highly variable, and unrealistically precise proxy estimate of the prestige of kinesiology-related journals. Several prestige metrics might be carefully interpreted to approximate general perceptions of journal prestige. Current evidence does not, however, support the precise ranking or numerical comparison of kinesiology journals into clear top-tier prestige status given the coverage and subdisciplinary bias, skew, and variability in most journal metrics.