Unfortunately, this practice spreads. Especially in the universities outside of USA. The databases most commonly used are ISI (Inst. of Sci. Information) Journal Citation reports and Scopus. Both of them are not freely available. For mathematics, they very poorly reflect the true reputation of the journals; a better database is MathSciNet, but nobody uses it. In general, using any such database for evaluation of individuals and institutions is very harmful, but it unfortunately spreads more and more.