Who is your target audience?
For journals with a practitioner focus, academic citations may be less valuable than mentions in policy documents (as reported by Altmetric). If your journal is for a purely academic audience, traditional citation metrics like Impact Factor are more relevant. If your journal has a regional focus, then geographical usage might be important to you.
What are you trying to achieve?
If your objective is to publish more high-quality, high-impact authors, consider analyzing the h-indices of authors in recent volumes to assess whether you’re achieving this. If your aim is to raise your journal’s profile within the wider community, it makes sense to consider altmetrics in your analysis. Perhaps your goal is to generate more citations from high-profile journals within your field – so looking at Eigenfactor rather than Impact Factor would be helpful.
What subject area are you working in?
The relevancy of different research metrics varies hugely between disciplines. Is Impact Factor appropriate, or would the 5-year Impact Factor be more representative of citation patterns in your field? Which metrics are your competitors using? It might be more useful to think about your journal’s ranking within its subject area, rather than considering specific metrics in isolation.
What business model does your journal use?
For journals following a traditional subscription model, usage can be particularly crucial. It’s a key consideration for librarians when it comes to renewals.