Journal Citescore* measures ratios of citations that papers in a given journal have received in one year, to those received in previous years.
A journal's Citescore is often publicised on its homepage, and there are tools available to benchmark metrics against one another. Free services to lookup Citescore and other journal metrics from the Scopus database are Scopus Journal Metrics and CWTS Journal Indicators.
CiteScore is not field-weighted so it is not appropriate for comparison between different subject areas for which SJR and SNIP values should be used. It is also not normalized by publication type, Elsevier states that their approach "gives a more complete picture of citation impact and makes manipulation of the calculation more difficult." (What is CiteScore?, 2025). This is valuable however it's important to recognize that certain publication types will be cited more than others, which could skew metric numbers.
* Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
CiteScore is calculated by taking the number of citations to articles, reviews, conference papers, book chapters, and data papers published by a journal over a four year period, divided by the total number of publications of the same type in the journal for the same four years (What is CiteScore?, 2025).
