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Journal impact factors (JIFs), which are calculated by Thomson Reuters (Philadelphia, PA, USA), are one of the most important indicators in evaluative bibliometrics. They are used in the scientific community as a basis for decision making on
Abstract
A number of proxy measures have been used as indicators of journal quality. The most recent and commonly employed are journal impact factors. These measures are somewhat controversial, although they are frequently referred to in establishing the impact of published journal articles. Within psychology, little is known about the relationship between the ‘objective’ impact factors of journals and the ‘subjective’ ratings of prestige and perceived publishing difficulty amongst academics. In order to address this, a cross-sectional web-based survey was conducted in the UK to investigate research activity and academics’ views of journals within three fields of psychology; cognitive, health and social. Impact factors for each journal were correlated with individual academic’s perceptions of prestige and publishing difficulty for each journal. A number of variables pertaining to the individual academic and their place of work were assessed as predictors of these correlation values, including age, gender, institution type, and a measure of departmental research activity. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to perceptions of journal prestige and publishing difficulty, higher education in general and the assessment of research activity within academic institutions.
Abstract
We studied the influence of the number of citations, the number of citable items and the number of journal self-citations on increases in the impact factor (IF) in 123 journals from the Journal Citation Reports database in which this scientometric indicator had decreased during the previous four years. In general, we did not find evidence that abuse of journal self-citations contributed to the increase in the impact factor after several years of decreases.
Abstract
In this paper we report on the results of an exploratory study of knowledge exchange between disciplines and subfields of science, based on bibliometric methods. The goal of this analysis is twofold. Firstly, we consider knowledge exchange between disciplines at a global level, by analysing cross-disciplinary citations in journal articles, based on the world publication output in 1999. Among others a central position of the Basic Life Sciences within the Life Sciences and of Physics within the Exact Sciences is shown. Limitations of analyses of interdisciplinary impact at the journal level are discussed. A second topic is a discussion of measures which may be used to quantify the rate of knowledge transfer between fields and the importance of work in a given field or for other disciplines. Two measures are applied, which appear to be proper indicators of impact of research on other fields. These indicators of interdisciplinary impact may be applied at other institutional levels as well.
Summary The contribution of Brazil to the database of the Institute for Scientific Information, ISI, has increased remarkably during the last years. Among the Brazilian research institutions, the publications of the University of São Paulo (USP) have been around 30& of the country's total publication within the ISI database. A similar share was found for USP's publications published in the 1980-1999 period and classified in the Life Sciences. This was observed in publications from both the highest impact factor journals and from those with the largest number of articles. We have found that the present share of USP's publications in some of the fields of the Life Sciences was much less than 30&, suggesting a gradual decentralization of the scientific activity in Brazil. The data point out that this set of USP's publications were concentrated in traditional and basic fields of biological research, where the focus is mainly oriented by international trends. The data suggest that USP's researchers have not been much devoted to some of the fields where research is oriented toward national issues.
Abstract
Abstract
All references data was extracted from the annual volumes of the CD-Edition of Science Citation Index (SCI) and the Web of Science of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), the journal citation and self-citation data extracted from the Journal Citation Report (JCR), the self-citing rate and self-cited rate calculated based on the JCR method. To determine the trend of mean value of references per paper throughout 1970–2005, a total number of 10,000 records were randomly chosen for each year of under study, and the mean value of references per paper was calculated. To determine the growth of journals IF a total number of 5,499 journals were chosen in the JCR in 2002 and the same set of journals in the year 2004. To show the trend of journals IF, all journals indexed in the JCR throughout 1999–2005 were extracted and the mean values of their IFs was calculated annually. The study showed that the number of references per paper from 1970 to 2005 has steady increased. It reached from 8.40 in 1970 to 34.63 in 2005, an increase of more than 4 times. The majority of publications (76.17%) were in the form of Journals Article. After articles, Meeting Abstracts (9.46%), Notes (3.90%) and Editorial Material (3.78%) are the most frequented publication forms, respectively. 94.57% of all publications were in English. After English, German (1.50%), Russian (1.48%) and French (1.37%) were the most frequented languages, respectively. The study furthermore showed that there is a significant correlation between the IF and total citation of journals in the JCR, and there is an important hidden correlation between IF and the self-citation of journals. This phenomena causes the elevation of journals IF. The more often a journal is citing other journals, the more often it is also cited (by a factor of 1.5) by others. In consequence the growing percentage of journal self-citation is followed by journal self-citedness, which can be considered as the Matthew Effect. There is a linear correlation between journal self-citing and journal self-cited value, the mean value of self-cited rate always stays higher than the self-citing rate. The mean value of self-cited rate in 2000 was 14% and the mean value of self-citing rate is 6.61%, whereas the mean value of self-cited rate in 2005 was 12% and the mean value of self-citing rate was 7.81%.
Abstract
Methods were developed to allow quality assessment of academic research in linguistics in allsub-disciplines. Data were obtained from samples of respondents from Flanders, the Netherlands,as well as a world-wide sample, evaluated journals, publishers, and scholars. Journals andpublishers were ranked by several methods. First, we weighted the number of times journals orpublishers were ranked as 'outstanding', 'good', or 'occasionally/not at all good'. To reduce theinfluence of unduly positive or negative biases of respondents, the most extreme ratings weretrimmed. A second weight reflects the (international) visibility of journals and publishers. Here,journals or publishers nominated by respondents from various countries or samples received agreater weight than journals or publishers nominated by respondents from one country or onesample only. Thirdly, a combined index reflects both quality and international visibility. Its use isillustrated on the output of scholars in linguistics. Limitations and potentials for application ofbibliometric methods in output assessments are discussed.
