Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)

The Source Normalized Impact per Paper, or SNIP, corrects a journal's citation rate for the citation behavior of its field so that journals in heavily cited and lightly cited disciplines can be compared on the same scale. Henk Moed introduced SNIP in 2010 with a distinctive twist: rather than classifying journals into predefined subject categories, it defines a journal's field from the bottom up as the set of papers that actually cite it, and it normalizes by that field's citation potential, measured from how long the citing papers' reference lists are. Fields whose authors cite many references generate more citations to go around, so a raw citation rate means different things in mathematics than in molecular biology. SNIP divides raw impact per paper by this citation potential to produce a field-corrected indicator. Ludo Waltman and colleagues revised the original formula in 2013 to remove some counterintuitive properties and improve stability; the revised SNIP is the version distributed in Scopus.