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SciVal Metric: SNIP (Source-Normalized Impact per Paper)
Last updated on June 25, 2026
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Back to all metricsSNIP measures the citation impact of a journal. SNIP is a ratio between the “Raw Impact per Paper”, a type of Citations per Publication calculation, actually received by the journal, compared to the “Citation Potential”, or expected Citations per Publication, of that journal’s field. SNIP takes differences in disciplinary characteristics into account and can be used to compare journals in different fields. The weighted average SNIP value for all journals in Scopus is 1.000.
Newly added journals will receive SNIP metrics in the next yearly calculation round (usually in June), from the year they are added and for all previous years. The first journal metric values for SNIP are available for 1999. For Scholarly Output published in the range 1996-1999, the journal metric value for 1999 is used.
SNIP is a:
- Citation Impact metric
Full details about SNIP can be found on the CWTS Journal Indicators website
- Benchmark the Scopus Sources or groups of Scopus Sources that are any size and that fall within any fields of research – SNIP is field-normalized
- Look at publishing activity in a way that is difficult to manipulate
- Investigate activity during the early stages of a new strategy when publications are just starting to appear, or the scholarly output of early-career researchers – the SNIP of the journals can be used as a proxy measure of potential citation impact
- The objective is to judge an entity’s publications based on their actual performance, rather than based on the average of a journal:
- A publication may appear in a journal with a very high SNIP value, and not itself receive any citations; even the most highly cited journals in the world contain publications that have never been cited.
- A publication may be very influential and have received many citations, without being published in a journal with a high SNIP value; journals which do not rank very highly in the data universe may still contain very highly cited publications.
- Entities are small and there may be gaps in their output within the Scopus coverage. A single missing publication from a small data set will have a significant negative impact on apparent performance. It is possible that some publications for a journal are not indexed in Scopus. Although in general this can be a small percentage of publications, we advise users to be vigilant and to bear this possible limitation in mind.
- Citation Count, Citations per Publication, Field-Weighted Citation Impact, Scholarly Output, CiteScore, SJR, Publications in Journal Quartiles and Publications in Top Journal Percentiles which can give a different perspective into the journal’s performance
- The set of all other “time-independent metrics”, which provide useful, reliable information immediately upon publication and do not rely on the passing of time for useful data to accumulate: Scholarly Output, Subject Area Count, Scopus Source Title Count, Collaboration, and Academic-Corporate Collaboration
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