A trusted method

SCImago Media Rankings guarantees a transparent and neutral analysis of data provided by prestigious analytics tools. Keep reading to know every detail.

Overview

The essentials to delivering accurate rankings that reinforce the impact of journalism

SCImago Media Rankings scrutinizes four digital indicators to analyze the digital reputation of media brands and accelerate the useful impact of journalism in society

Scientific rigor

Standard academic practices in all processes

Open access

We are driven by transparency and thus share all our data

Objectivity

An approach that prevents conflict of interest

Initial characterization

Our team collects essential parameters to provide a first thermometer of the industry's current reality and evolution

Each organization is classified following these characteristics:

— Typology: generalists, sports, economic, specialized and audiovisual
— Language: monitors the primary languages of publication to assess global communication impact
— Country: region and city of publication/media reference
— Coverage: international, national, regional-provincial, local
— Support: printed vs. digital natives

Selection criteria

01.

Journalistic organizations

Currently, we focus on general information, specialized media (sports, finance) and audiovisual firms.

The goal is to include other strategic sectors to craft a comprehensive overview of the media ecosystem

02.

Autonomy as a cybermedia

The list of media is filtered to include sites with their own URL, ruling out subdomains.

We also leave out those that do not have independence and those that do not go beyond posting a PDF of the printed edition on the Internet

03.

From glocal to global

We rule out strictly local informative projects.

We understand that they may be the object of a particular analysis closely linked, in this case, to independent journalism

Indicators

Our rankings are built on a foundation of key indicators sourced from industry-leading tools like SEMRUSH and MAJESTIC. These metrics evaluate the quality, influence and trustworthiness of media websites in the digital landscape

The overall indicator Using four metrics—Authority Score, Referring Domains, Citation Flow, and Trust Flow—with an equal weight of 25%, we construct an overall indicator that reflects media websites’ digital reputation. The results define their relative position in the ranking and permit a comparison of digital development and leadership

Semrush

— Authority score: Measures the overall quality of a website and its influence on SEO. Calculated based on backlinks, referring domains, organic search traffic, and other data
— Referring domains: A metric based on the total number of referring domains. Values are normalized using a logarithmic transformation and scaled from 0 to 100

Majestic

— Citation flow: Reflects the number of links pointing to a website, regardless of their quality. A higher citation flow indicates a large number of backlinks
— Trust flow: Measures the quality of links pointing to a website. Websites with a higher trust flow than citation flow typically have higher quality backlinks

Expert team for expert tools

Our organization is formed by leading professionals in the fields of Journalism, Social Sciences research and data analysis

SCImago Media Rankings is part of SCImago Lab, a company devoted to visualizing the sense of data. We help our clients enhance their communication and publication channels by developing Science, Technology and Innovation solutions

Félix de Moya-Anegón

Founder and Chief Researcher, SCImago Lab

Leading specialist in bibliometrics and information systems. He has acted as a consultant for international organizations such as the World Bank or the OECD

Lluís Codina

Researcher, Pompeu Fabra University

Co-director of the Cybermedia Observatory (OCM). His expertise lies in critical fields, such as innovation in journalism and SEO

Ramón Salaverría

Researcher, University of Navarra

He directs Iberifier, an observatory for the study of digital media promoted by the European Commission, and is author of more than 250 publications

Magdalena Trillo-Domínguez

Researcher, University of Granada

Researcher and journalism professional for more than twenty years. She specializes on journalistic innovation, new genres an the application of scientometric