scholarly journals Mixing journal, article, and author citations, and other pitfalls in the bibliographic impact factor

2003 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 1847-1862 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miquel Porta ◽  
José L. Copete ◽  
Esteve Fernandez ◽  
Joan Alguacil ◽  
Janeth Murillo
Keyword(s):  
Impact Factor ◽  
Journal Article ◽  
Scientific Information ◽  
Scientific Journals ◽  
Biomedical Journals ◽  
Health Studies ◽  
Individual Article ◽  
Author Citations ◽  
Number Of Citations ◽  
Specific Number

News of the death of biomedical journals seem premature. Revamped traditional scientific journals remain highly valued sources and vehicles of information, critical debate, and knowledge. Some analyses seem to place a disproportionate emphasis on technological and formal issues, as compared to the importance ascribed to matters of power. Not all journals must necessarily have a large circulation. There are many examples of efficient, high-quality journals with a great impact on relatively small audiences for whom the journal is thought-provoking, useful, and pleasant to read. How can we achieve a better understanding of an article’s spectrum of impacts? A certain mixing of three distinct entities (journals, articles, and authors) has often pervaded judgments. Data used by the Institute for Scientific Information present weaknesses in their accuracy. The two-year limit for citations to count towards the bibliographic impact factor favors "fast-moving", "basic" biomedical disciplines and is less appropriate for public health studies. Increasing attention is given to the specific number of citations received by each individual article. It is possible to make progress towards more valid, accurate, fair, and relevant assessments.

Editorial

2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-95
Author(s):  
Charles E. Lyman
Keyword(s):  
Impact Factor ◽  
Scientific Information ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Editorial Board Member ◽  
Initial Letter ◽  
Strong Impact ◽  
National Library ◽  
The Past ◽  
Number Of Citations

Microscopy and Microanalysis has made significant strides forward over the past year, and I would like to comment on two of these. First, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) ranked this journal third among the nine microscopy journals it indexes. The ranking was in terms of ISI's Impact Factor, which tracks the number of citations to papers published in the journal. A strong Impact Factor indicates that information in the journal is of interest to other workers in the field. Second, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) has selected Microscopy and Microanalysis to be indexed in MEDLINE (PubMed), beginning with the first issue of 2003. As any biologist will tell you, this listing is essential for the electronic visibility of papers in the fast-moving world of life sciences research. I thank Editorial Board member Dave Piston for his efforts in writing the initial letter of application to the NLM.

scholarly journals An Author’s Dilemma: Where to Publish?

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-59
Author(s):  
Raju Kafle
Keyword(s):  
Impact Factor ◽  
Scholarly Communication ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
National Library ◽  
Predatory Journals ◽  
Biomedical Journals ◽  
The Mean ◽  
The Right ◽  
Number Of Citations ◽  
Future Reference

Journals are the essence of scholarly communication. They not only serve to disseminate latest scientific advancements but also provide a platform for archiving scholarly information for future reference, and allow a researcher to assert his or her scientific caliber. Selecting the most suitable journal to showcase one’s scholarly work is no mean feat. With more than 43,000 biomedical journals listed with PubMed1, the database maintained by United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), this exercise can easily baffle an inexperienced researcher. The huge risk of rejection of a paper from a journal that is not the right fit, and a widening web of dubious and predatory journals which publish almost everything sent to them, make this task particularly daunting. You may think that getting your paper into a journal with the highest possible impact factor is your only concern. However, this makes sense only if you think that you will be judged solely on the journal your paper is in rather than the quality and actual impact of the work. Although journal name and impact factor are still used to judge papers (or even researchers), the problems with this approach are becoming more widely known.2 Within one journal, papers can vary enormously in their quality and citations so it is unfair to judge a single paper by the mean number of citations in a whole journal.

scholarly journals Indexing of the Russian biomedical journals in MEDLINE and PubMed: analysis of the positive and negative experience

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-47
Author(s):  
Yury I. Philippov
Keyword(s):  
Web Search ◽  
Web Of Science ◽  
Selection Process ◽  
Scientific Information ◽  
Scientific Journals ◽  
Negative Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
Medline Database ◽  
Biomedical Journals ◽  
Web Platform

The MEDLINE database and PubMed.com web-platform are the world’s best-known and most used sources for search scientific information in biology and medicine. Indexing in MEDLINE and making a journal searchable through PubMed.com is a most powerful tool to promote it worldwide. No other databases, even Scopus and Web of Science, can be compared with MEDLINE in terms of its effect on the readability and availability in web-search results. At the same time, medical and biological journals from Russia have serious problems with the MEDLINE indexation results in an extremely low presence of publications from Russian journals in this database. Over the past decade, the number of Russian journals indexed in MEDLINE has significantly decreased. Present article discusses the main characteristics of the MEDLINE database and PubMed.com, their journal selection process and the reasons for their high importance in scientific journals promotion, as well as the experience of submitting journals for peer review to be indexed in this database. Both positive and negative experience of preparing a journal for indexing in MEDLINE is considered, this can help the editors and publishers of all biology and medicine journals in Russia in solving this task.

Der Impact Factor

Phlebologie ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 27 (03) ◽  
pp. 77-83
Author(s):  
A. Finzen
Keyword(s):  
Impact Factor ◽  
Scientific Information ◽  
Impact Factors ◽  
Wissenschaftliche Karrieren

ZusammenfassungWissenschaftliche Leistungen leben von der Originalität ihrer Urheber. Der Ver-such, sie zu quantifizieren, erscheint als Widerspruch in sich. Um so irritierender ist der Siegeszug des sogenannten Impact Factors, eines Konstrukts des amerikanischen Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), das den Anspruch stellt, über die Häufigkeit der Zitierung von – vom ISI erfaßten – Zeitschriften das Gewicht der in diesen publizierenden Wissenschaftler zu messen. Seit naturwissenschaftliche und medizinische Forschungseinrichtungen und Fakultäten dazu übergehen, den Impact Factor zur Grundlage für die Verteilung von Forschungsgeldern und zur Guillotine für wissenschaftliche Karrieren zu machen, schickt er sich an, die internationale Wissenschaftskultur zu verändern. Deshalb ist es an der Zeit, daß die Öffentlichkeit dieses Zeitgeistphänomen zur Kenntnis nimmt und sich mit seinen Folgen auseinandersetzt.

scholarly journals Number 1 Microscopy Journal

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 5-5
Author(s):  
Charles Lyman
Keyword(s):  
Impact Factor ◽  
Scientific Journals ◽  
Thomson Reuters ◽  
The World

Microscopy and Microanalysis, the sister publication of this magazine, is currently the #1 microscopy journal in the world, according to the Thomson-Reuters-ISI organization that ranks scientific journals on the basis of Impact Factor. This ranking is based on our Impact Factor of 2.992 for the year 2008 (the most recent data available). This is the culmination of a long climb from the journal's beginning in 1995.

scholarly journals Scientific journals: Indexation and impact factor

Lung India ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 300 ◽  
Author(s):  
RolandE Akhigbe
Keyword(s):  
Impact Factor ◽  
Scientific Journals

scholarly journals Retraction policies of top scientific journals ranked by impact factor

2015 ◽  
Vol 103 (3) ◽  
pp. 136-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
David B. Resnik ◽  
Elizabeth Wager ◽  
Grace E. Kissling
Keyword(s):  
Impact Factor ◽  
Scientific Journals

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 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.

scholarly journals The effects of an editor serving as one of the reviewers during the peer-review process

F1000Research ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 683 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Giordan ◽  
Attila Csikasz-Nagy ◽  
Andrew M. Collings ◽  
Federico Vaggi
Keyword(s):  
Peer Review ◽  
Review Process ◽  
Peer Review Process ◽  
Final Decision ◽  
Scientific Journals ◽  
Scientific Publications ◽  
Peer Reviewers ◽  
Decision Type ◽  
Number Of Citations ◽  
Decision Times

BackgroundPublishing in scientific journals is one of the most important ways in which scientists disseminate research to their peers and to the wider public. Pre-publication peer review underpins this process, but peer review is subject to various criticisms and is under pressure from growth in the number of scientific publications.MethodsHere we examine an element of the editorial process ateLife, in which the Reviewing Editor usually serves as one of the referees, to see what effect this has on decision times, decision type, and the number of citations. We analysed a dataset of 8,905 research submissions toeLifesince June 2012, of which 2,750 were sent for peer review, using R and Python to perform the statistical analysis.ResultsThe Reviewing Editor serving as one of the peer reviewers results in faster decision times on average, with the time to final decision ten days faster for accepted submissions (n=1,405) and 5 days faster for papers that were rejected after peer review (n=1,099). There was no effect on whether submissions were accepted or rejected, and a very small (but significant) effect on citation rates for published articles where the Reviewing Editor served as one of the peer reviewers.ConclusionsAn important aspect ofeLife’s peer-review process is shown to be effective, given that decision times are faster when the Reviewing Editor serves as a reviewer. Other journals hoping to improve decision times could consider adopting a similar approach.

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