Journal Impact Factors: SJR vs ISI Web of Knowledge

UPDATE: Get the 2009 Impact Factor Here

Journal Impact is/has become an ever important aspect to a researcher’s life.  Not only has publish or perish forged itself as a “law”, but continued existence is just as dependent on the quality of journal that your work gets published.  Unfortunately 2 lower publications are not worth the same as 1 higher ranked journal… nor are 5 Oncogenes equal to one Cell paper.  Regardless of if this system is correct, its our current reality, and therefore having a good visual guide to what a journals ranking is can be a huge help when preparing a manuscript. But which impact factor is the best one to go by ????

In the past the gold standard was the ISI Web of Knowledge, but now there is a new kid in town, the SJR journal & Country Rank, powered by Scopus. So which one is better? After taking a look through some of the more common journals for cell biology, I’m leaning towards the SJR, it seems to fit a bit more with my gut feeling of how good a journal is, although that is a highly unscientific measure. So I will let the graphs speak for themselves and let you decide which is better.