of TIERS and rankings : SCIMago SJR

ISI and SciMago provide information about tiers and ranking. As I musing across the net to fill in the hula-huli KPI for the said tiers, I’ve found out about this list of SciMago SJR tiers, Q1-Q4, but I am still searching for the ISI tiers list, hope to find it soon. Here is the link :

http://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php?area=0&category=0&region=Asiatic+Region&year=all&order=it&min=0&min_type=it

BTWwhat is this tiers? This is my opinion:

MOHE (Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia) adopts a ranking system to rate and reward researchers. Currently MOHE  has decided to use ISI impact factors and also SCIMago SJR (SCOPUS) as for the ranking system.

How to calculate it?  From UM Bulletin, this is the exerpt, written by Ms Janaki S, The Chief Librarian of UM :

http://www.um.edu.my/doc/File/administration/schopus/Ergon%20April%202012.pdf

Journal Ranking Using JCR
(Journal Citation Reports)
The recent interest in information on journal ranking sparked off by the new Key Performance Indicators for academics and postgraduates has raised a few eyebrows whose owners raise questions such as: Who decides the ranking? Why is this journal better than the other?, etc. The Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is used to evaluate
journal ranking for journals indexed in ISI Web of Science. Journals are commonly ranked as Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 and Tier 4. JCR is used by many decision makers in research management, editorial policy and library management. Besides JCR, other journal evaluation techniques are also available. Journals published by
Scopus are evaluated by SciMago Journal Rank (SJR) which was developed from the Google PageRank algorithm. At the University of Malaya, JCR is used as a guide for evaluating journals. As such, this short article will explain: (i) How journals are ranked in tiers, (ii) Who decides the subject categories of journals and (iii) How
to calculate journal ranking in tiers using JCR.

How are journals ranked in tiers?
The citation system simply decides the ranking. It is a simple calculation. The total number of citations and articles over a period of two years, to get the impact factor for a journal. The total journal titles in a specific subject category are then arranged by the impact factor in descending order. After this, they are divided equally into four groups. The first group reflects the top 25% of journal titles and is referred to as Tier 1. Tier 2 contains the next 26-50%, Tier 3 from 51 to 75% and finally Tier 4 is for the rest from 76 to 100%. The tier levels can change as the impact factors of the journals change. Similarly, it can also change with the increase or decrease in the total
number of journals in any subject category.”