scholarly journals Quality weighted citations versus total citations in the sciences and social sciences, with an application to finance and accounting

2016 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 324-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chia-Lin Chang ◽  
Michael McAleer
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Impact Factor ◽  
Research Assessment ◽  
Academic Journal ◽  
Additional Measure ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Thomson Reuters ◽  
Number Of Citations ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Article Influence

Purpose – Both journal self-citations and exchanged citations have the effect of increasing a journal’s impact factor, which may be deceptive. The purpose of this paper is to analyse academic journal quality and research impact using quality-weighted citations vs total citations, based on the widely used Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science citations database (ISI). A new Index of Citations Quality (ICQ) is presented, based on quality-weighted citations. Design/methodology/approach – The new index is used to analyse the leading 500 journals in both the sciences and social sciences, as well as finance and accounting, using quantifiable Research Assessment Measures (RAMs) that are based on alternative transformations of citations. Findings – It is shown that ICQ is a useful additional measure to 2-year impact factor (2YIF) and other well-known RAMs for the purpose of evaluating the impact and quality, as well as ranking, of journals as it contains information that has very low correlations with the information contained in the well-known RAMs for both the sciences and social sciences, and finance and accounting. Practical implications – Journals can, and do, inflate the number of citations through self-citation practices, which may be coercive. Another method for distorting journal impact is through a set of journals agreeing to cite each other, that is, by exchanging citations. This may be less coercive than self-citations, but is nonetheless unprofessional and distortionary. Social implications – The premise underlying the use of citations data is that higher quality journals generally have a higher number of citations. The impact of citations can be distorted in a number of ways, both consciously and unconsciously. Originality/value – Regardless of whether self-citations arise through collusive practices, the increase in citations will affect both 2YIF and 5-year impact factor (5YIF), though not Eigenfactor and Article Influence. This leads to an ICQ, where a higher ICQ would generally be preferred to lower. Unlike 5YIF, which is increased by journal self-citations and exchanged citations, and Eigenfactor and Article Influence, both of which are affected by quality-weighted exchanged citations, ICQ will be less affected by exchanged citations. In the absence of any empirical evidence to the contrary, 5YIF and AI are assumed to be affected similarly by exchanged citations.

scholarly journals Ranking Economics and Econometrics ISI Journals by Quality Weighted Citations

2014 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chia-Lin Chang ◽  
Michael McAleer
Keyword(s):  
Impact Factor ◽  
Web Of Science ◽  
Research Assessment ◽  
Academic Journal ◽  
Additional Measure ◽  
Journal Quality ◽  
Isi Web Of Science ◽  
Thomson Reuters ◽  
Assessment Measures ◽  
Journal Impact

AbstractThe paper analyses academic journal quality and impact using quality weighted citations that are based on the widely-used Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science citations database (ISI). A recently developed Index of Citations Quality (ICQ), based on quality weighted citations, is used to analyse the top 276 Economics and top 10 Econometrics journals in the ISI Economics category using alternative quantifiable Research Assessment Measures (RAMs). It is shown that ICQ is a useful additional measure to the 2-Year Impact Factor (2YIF) and other well known RAMs available in ISI for the purpose of evaluating journal impact and quality, as well as ranking, of Economics and Econometrics journals as it contains information that has very low correlations with the information contained in alternative well-known RAMs. Among other findings, the top Econometrics journals have some of the highest ICQ scores in the ISI category of Economics.

Coverage, field specialisation and the impact of scientific publishers indexed in the Book Citation Index

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Torres-Salinas ◽  
Nicolas Robinson-Garcia ◽  
Juan Miguel Campanario ◽  
Emilio Delgado López-Cózar
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Citation Index ◽  
Descriptive Study ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Thomson Reuters ◽  
Subject Categories ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Scientific Publishers

Purpose – The aim of this study is to analyse the disciplinary coverage of Thomson Reuters' Book Citation Index database focusing on publisher presence, impact and specialisation. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted a descriptive study in which they examined coverage by discipline, publisher distribution by field and country of publication, and publisher impact. For this purpose the Thomson Reuters' subject categories were aggregated into 15 disciplines. Findings – Humanities and social sciences comprise 30 per cent of the total share of this database. Most of the disciplines are covered by very few publishers mainly from the UK and USA (75.05 per cent of the books), in fact 33 publishers hold 90 per cent of the whole share. Regarding publisher impact, 80.5 per cent of the books and chapters remained uncited. Two serious errors were found in this database: the Book Citation Index does not retrieve all citations for books and chapters; and book citations do not include citations to their chapters. Originality/value – There are currently no studies analysing in depth the coverage of this novel database which covers monographs.

scholarly journals WHAT DO EXPERTS KNOW ABOUT FORECASTING JOURNAL QUALITY? A COMPARISON WITH ISI RESEARCH IMPACT IN FINANCE

2013 ◽  
Vol 08 (01) ◽  
pp. 1350005 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHIA-LIN CHANG ◽  
MICHAEL MCALEER
Keyword(s):  
Impact Factor ◽  
Research Impact ◽  
Harmonic Mean ◽  
Research Assessment ◽  
Journal Quality ◽  
Approval Ratings ◽  
Thomson Reuters ◽  
Journal Impact ◽  
Highly Cited ◽  
Article Influence

Experts possess knowledge and information that are not publicly available. The paper is concerned with forecasting academic journal quality and research impact using a survey of international experts from a national project on ranking academic finance journals in Taiwan. A comparison is made with publicly available bibliometric data, namely the Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science citations database (hereafter ISI) for the Business–Finance (hereafter Finance) category. The paper analyses the leading international journals in Finance using expert scores and quantifiable Research Assessment Measures (RAMs), and highlights the similarities and differences in the expert scores and alternative RAMs, where the RAMs are based on alternative transformations of citations taken from the ISI database. Alternative RAMs may be calculated annually or updated daily to answer the perennial questions as to When, Where and How (frequently) published papers are cited (see Chang et al., 2011a,b,c). The RAMs include the most widely used RAM, namely the classic 2-year impact factor including journal self citations (2YIF), 2-year impact factor excluding journal self citations (2YIF*), 5-year impact factor including journal self citations (5YIF), Immediacy (or zero-year impact factor (0YIF)), Eigenfactor, Article Influence, C3PO (Citation Performance per Paper Online), h-index, PI-BETA (Papers Ignored — By even the Authors), 2-year Self-citation Threshold Approval Ratings (2Y-STAR), Historical Self-citation Threshold Approval Ratings (H-STAR), Impact Factor Inflation (IFI), and Cited Article Influence (CAI). As data are not available for 5YIF, Article Influence and CAI for 13 of the leading 34 journals considered, 10 RAMs are analysed for 21 highly-cited journals in Finance. The harmonic mean of the ranks of the 10 RAMs for the 34 highly-cited journals are also presented. It is shown that emphasizing the 2-year impact factor of a journal, which partly answers the question as to When published papers are cited, to the exclusion of other informative RAMs, which answer Where and How (frequently) published papers are cited, can lead to a distorted evaluation of journal impact and influence relative to the Harmonic Mean rankings. A linear regression model is used to forecast expert scores on the basis of RAMs that capture journal impact, journal policy, the number of high quality papers, and quantitative information about a journal. The robustness of the rankings is also analyzed.

A bibliometric analysis of the Journal of Membrane Science (1976-2010)

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 698-713 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hui-Zhen Fu ◽  
Yuh-Shan Ho
Keyword(s):  
Impact Factor ◽  
Bibliometric Analysis ◽  
Chemical Engineering ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Polymer Science ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Number Of Citations ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Membrane Science

Purpose – This study aims to examine publication characteristics and development of a science journal Journal of Membrane Science (JMS) with 35 years ' history by bibliometric indicators. Design/methodology/approach – A bibliometric approach was used to identify its document types, impact factor, publication outputs, most cited articles and large contributing countries/territories and institutions. The main indicators included impact factor, CPP (citations per publication), TC2010 (number of citations from one paper’s publication to the end of 2010), C2010 (number of citations in the year of 2010), number of total articles, “single country articles” and “single institution articles”, “internationally collaborative articles” and “inter-institutionally collaborative articles”, “first author articles” and “corresponding author articles”. The annual citations of most cited articles were displayed in a table list. Findings – The two-year citation window used by impact factor is not fair for a journal which had its peak annual citations in the third or more years. JMS would get a better citation performance if impact factor can be calculated for three or four years. Impact factor is affected by the size of its subject categories. JMS showed higher impact factor rankings in both chemical engineering and polymer science category in the early twenty-first century. Furthermore, the G8 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK and the USA) contributed more than a half of the total, with higher CPP. National University of Singapore, University of Twente and Chinese Academy of Sciences were the main contributing institutions. The citation life cycles revealed the impact history of most cited articles. Originality/value – A bibliometric analysis has been carried out to analyze the characteristics of a journal with 35 years ' history. Some improved indicators including TC2010, C2010, TP, SP, CP, FP and RP have been used for the evaluation. This study provides an evidence from JMS to discuss the feasibility and limitations of impact factor.

scholarly journals Use of the journal impact factor for assessing individual articles: Statistically flawed or not?

F1000Research ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 366
Author(s):  
Ludo Waltman ◽  
Vincent A. Traag
Keyword(s):  
Impact Factor ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Journal Impact Factor ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
Research Assessment ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Number Of Citations ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Journal Impact ◽  
Accurate Indicator

Most scientometricians reject the use of the journal impact factor for assessing individual articles and their authors. The well-known San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment also strongly objects against this way of using the impact factor. Arguments against the use of the impact factor at the level of individual articles are often based on statistical considerations. The skewness of journal citation distributions typically plays a central role in these arguments. We present a theoretical analysis of statistical arguments against the use of the impact factor at the level of individual articles. Our analysis shows that these arguments do not support the conclusion that the impact factor should not be used for assessing individual articles. Using computer simulations, we demonstrate that under certain conditions the number of citations an article has received is a more accurate indicator of the value of the article than the impact factor. However, under other conditions, the impact factor is a more accurate indicator. It is important to critically discuss the dominant role of the impact factor in research evaluations, but the discussion should not be based on misplaced statistical arguments. Instead, the primary focus should be on the socio-technical implications of the use of the impact factor.

scholarly journals JUST HOW GOOD ARE THE TOP THREE JOURNALS IN FINANCE? AN ASSESSMENT BASED ON QUANTITY AND QUALITY CITATIONS

2014 ◽  
Vol 09 (01) ◽  
pp. 1450005 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHIA-LIN CHANG ◽  
MICHAEL MCALEER
Keyword(s):  
Impact Factor ◽  
Monetary Economics ◽  
Research Impact ◽  
Research Assessment ◽  
Academic Journal ◽  
H Index ◽  
Journal Quality ◽  
Thomson Reuters ◽  
Approval Rating ◽  
Alternative Measures

The paper is concerned with ranking academic journal quality and research impact in Finance, based on the widely-used Thomson Reuters ISI (2013) Web of Science citations database (hereafter ISI). The paper analyses the 89 leading international journals in the ISI category of "Business–Finance" using quantifiable Research Assessment Measures (RAMs). The analysis highlights the similarities and differences in various RAMs, all of which are based on alternative transformations of journal citations and impact. Alternative RAMs may be calculated annually or updated daily to determine the citations frequency of published papers that are cited in journals listed in ISI. The RAMs include the classic 2-year impact factor including journal self citations (2YIF), 2-year impact factor excluding journal self citations (2YIF*), 5-year impact factor including journal self citations (5YIF), Immediacy including journal self citations, Eigenfactor (or Journal Influence), Article Influence (AI), h-index, Papers Ignored-By Even The Authors (PI-BETA), Self-citation Threshold Approval Rating (STAR), 5YD2 (namely, 5YIF divided by 2YIF), Escalating Self Citations (ESC) and Index of Citation Quality (ICQ). The paper calculates the harmonic mean (HM) of the ranks of up to 16 RAMs. It is shown that emphasizing 2YIF to the exclusion of other informative RAMs can lead to a misleading evaluation of journal quality and impact relative to the HM of the ranks. The analysis of the 89 ISI journals in Finance makes it clear that there are three leading journals in Finance, namely Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics and Review of Financial Studies, which form an exclusive club in terms of the RAMs that measure journal quality and impact based on alternative measures of journal citations. The next two journals in Finance in terms of overall quality and impact are Journal of Accounting and Economics and Journal of Monetary Economics. As Accounting does not have a separate classification in ISI, the tables of rankings given in the paper are also used to rank the top 3 journals in the sub-category of Accounting in the ISI category of "Business – Finance", namely Journal of Accounting and Economics, Accounting Review, and Journal of Accounting Research.

scholarly journals Use of the journal impact factor for assessing individual articles need not be statistically wrong

F1000Research ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 366
Author(s):  
Ludo Waltman ◽  
Vincent A. Traag
Keyword(s):  
Impact Factor ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Journal Impact Factor ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
Research Assessment ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Number Of Citations ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Journal Impact

Most scientometricians reject the use of the journal impact factor for assessing individual articles and their authors. The well-known San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment also strongly objects against this way of using the impact factor. Arguments against the use of the impact factor at the level of individual articles are often based on statistical considerations. The skewness of journal citation distributions typically plays a central role in these arguments. We present a theoretical analysis of statistical arguments against the use of the impact factor at the level of individual articles. Our analysis shows that these arguments do not support the conclusion that the impact factor should not be used for assessing individual articles. In fact, our computer simulations demonstrate the possibility that the impact factor is a more accurate indicator of the value of an article than the number of citations the article has received. It is important to critically discuss the dominant role of the impact factor in research evaluations, but the discussion should not be based on misplaced statistical arguments. Instead, the primary focus should be on the socio-technical implications of the use of the impact factor.

scholarly journals Citation patterns between impact-factor and questionable journals

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emanuel Kulczycki ◽  
Marek Hołowiecki ◽  
Zehra Taşkın ◽  
Franciszek Krawczyk
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Impact Factor ◽  
Web Of Science ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Impact Factors ◽  
Predatory Journals ◽  
Subject Categories ◽  
Citation Indexes ◽  
Number Of Citations ◽  
The Impact

AbstractOne of the most fundamental issues in academia today is understanding the differences between legitimate and questionable publishing. While decision-makers and managers consider journals indexed in popular citation indexes such as Web of Science or Scopus as legitimate, they use two lists of questionable journals (Beall’s and Cabell’s), one of which has not been updated for a few years, to identify the so-called predatory journals. The main aim of our study is to reveal the contribution of the journals accepted as legitimate by the authorities to the visibility of questionable journals. For this purpose, 65 questionable journals from social sciences and 2338 Web-of-Science-indexed journals that cited these questionable journals were examined in-depth in terms of index coverages, subject categories, impact factors and self-citation patterns. We have analysed 3234 unique cited papers from questionable journals and 5964 unique citing papers (6750 citations of cited papers) from Web of Science journals. We found that 13% of the questionable papers were cited by WoS journals and 37% of the citations were from impact-factor journals. The findings show that neither the impact factor of citing journals nor the size of cited journals is a good predictor of the number of citations to the questionable journals.

An indicator of the impact of journals based on the percentage of their highly cited publications

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 398-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara M. González-Betancor ◽  
Pablo Dorta-González
Keyword(s):  
Impact Factor ◽  
Time Window ◽  
Citation Impact ◽  
Library Science ◽  
Impact Indicator ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Number Of Citations ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Highly Cited Articles ◽  
Highly Cited

Purpose The two most used citation impact indicators in the assessment of scientific journals are, nowadays, the impact factor and the h-index. However, both indicators are not field normalized (vary heavily depending on the scientific category). Furthermore, the impact factor is not robust to the presence of articles with a large number of citations, while the h-index depends on the journal size. These limitations are very important when comparing journals of different sizes and categories. The purpose of this paper is to propose an alternative citation impact indicator, based on the percentage of highly cited articles in the journal. Design/methodology/approach This alternative indicator is empirically compared with the impact factor and the h-index, considering different time windows and citation percentiles (levels of citation for considering an article as highly cited compared to others in the same year and category). The authors use four journal categories (Clarivate Analytics Web of Science) which are quite different according to the publication profiles and citation levels (Information Science & Library Science, Operations Research & Management Science, Ophthalmology, and Physics Condensed Matter). Findings After analyzing 20 different indicators, depending on the citation percentile and the time window in which citations are counted, the indicator that seems to best homogenize the categories is the one that considers a time window of two years and a citation level of 10 percent. Originality/value The percentage of highly cited articles in a journal is field normalized (comparable between scientific categories), independent of the journal size and also robust to the presence of articles with a high number of citations.

scholarly journals Bibliometric analysis of multi-language veterinary journals

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-353
Author(s):  
Erwin KRAUSKOPF ◽  
Fernanda GARCIA ◽  
Robert FUNK
Keyword(s):  
Impact Factor ◽  
Bibliometric Analysis ◽  
Web Of Science ◽  
Country Of Origin ◽  
Citation Distribution ◽  
Journal Citation Reports ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Number Of Citations ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Main Language

Abstract The purpose of this study was to investigate the association between language and total number of citations found among documents in journals written in English and other languages. We selected all the journals clustered together in the Journal Citation Reports 2014 under the subject category “Veterinary Sciences” and downloaded all the data registered between 1994-2013 by Web of Science for the journals that stated publishing documents in languages other than English. We classified each of these journals by quartile and extracted information regarding their impact factor, language(s) stated, country of origin, total number of documents published, total number of reviews published, percentage of documents published in English and the quartile in which each journal ranked. Of the 48,118 documents published by the 28 journals analyzed, 55.8% were published in English. Interestingly, although most of the journals state being multi-language, most documents published in quartile 1 journals were in English (an average of 99.2%), while the percentage was 93.1% in quartile 2 journals, 62.1% in quartile 3 journals and 27.4% in quartile 4 journals. We also confirmed that citation distribution in these journals was highly skewed. The results of this study suggest that journals should consider adopting English as the main language as this will increase citation counts and the impact factor of the journal.

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