What is Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)?
Last updated on September 03, 2024Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) measures the contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field for a source. It helps you make a direct comparison of sources in different subject fields.
SNIP takes into account characteristics of a source subject field, which is the set of documents citing that source. SNIP considers:
- The frequency at which authors cite other papers in their reference lists
- The speed at which citation impact matures
- The extent to which the database used in the assessment covers the field’s literature
SNIP is the ratio of average citation count per paper and the citation potential of its subject field for a source.
The citation potential of a subject field is the average number of references per document citing that source. It represents the likelihood of being cited for documents in a particular field. A source in a field with a high citation potential tends to have a high impact per paper.
Citation potential is important because it accounts for the fact that typical citation counts vary widely between research disciplines. For example, they tend to be higher in life sciences than in mathematics or social sciences. If papers in one subject field contain an average of 40 cited references while those in another contain an average of 10, then the former field has a citation potential that is 4 times higher than that of the latter.
Citation potential also varies between subject fields within a discipline. For instance, basic journals tend to show higher citation potentials than applied or clinical journals, and journals covering emerging topics tend to have higher citation potentials than periodicals in well established areas.
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