Three new parameters in bibliometric research and their application to rerank periodicals in the field of biochemistry

Ranking of scientific periodicals by the method of citation counting provides valueable information about the degree of importance of the ranked periodicals. But such lists suffer from some inherent limitations. This paper discusses various pitfalls of traditional ranking lists and suggests, as a remedial measure, three new bibliometric parameters, namely, (1) scientific interest of a journal in relation to total number of articles published; (2) compactness of information content in a scientific periodical; and (3) scientific value of the papers in relation to compactness of presentation. It is believed that these new parameters, whenever applied to any traditional ranking list, will help to identify the accurate positions of different scientific journals of the parent list in order of their usefulness and importance. As a case study these parameters have been applied to the first ten core journals of biochemistry identified earlier and a revised reranked order of the titles presented and discussed.     

The growth of biophysical literature

The enormous growth of biophysical literature has created great difficulties in tracking out the significant literature of the subject. To cope with this unprecedented growth of literature, a new bibliometric technique has been applied to rank periodicals in the field based on 4228 citation data collected from the bibliographic data base published in the source journal namely,Annual Review of Biophysics. This list is expected to reflect the impact of literature on the advancement of knowledge in the field of biophysics. A striking feature of the ranking list is the high positions occupied by multidisciplinary science journals and biochemical journals as compared to journals exclusively and specifically devoted to biophysics or any particular aspects of it. Other remarkable findings are the wide scatter of biophysics literature; dominance of the USA journals and status attained by English as the preferred medium of communications of the working biophysicists. The data are also analysed according to subject categorization of the ranked periodicals. The results of the present study have been discussed in relation to Bradford's Law of Scattering and validity of the extension of the law, suggested earlier, has been well established. It is expected that the present ranking list will enable the working biophysicists to select journals from the viewpoint of their significance to the active areas of present-day biophysical research.     

Impact of open access on citation of scholarly publications in the field of civil engineering

The development of science is accompanied by growth of scholarly publications, primarily in the form of articles in peer-reviewed journals. Scientific work is often evaluated through the number of scientific publications in international journals and their citations. This article discusses the impact of open access (OA) on the number of citations for an institution from the field of civil engineering. We analyzed articles, published in 2007 in 14 international journals with impact factor, which are included in the Journal Citation Reports subject category “Civil Engineering”. The influence of open access on the number of citations was analyzed. The aim of our research was to determine if open access articles from the field of civil engineering receive more citations than non-open access articles. Based on the value of impact factor and ranking in quartiles, we also looked at the influence of the rank of journals on the number of citations, separately for OA and Non OA articles, in databases Web of Science (WOS), Scopus and Google Scholar. For 2,026 studied articles we found out that 22 % of them were published as OA articles. They received 29 % of all citations in the observed period. We can conclude by the significance level 5 % or less that in the databases WOS and Scopus the articles from top ranked journals (first quartile) achieved more citations than Non OA articles. This argument can be confirmed for some other journals from second quartile as well, while for the journals ranked into the third quartile it can’t be confirmed. This could be confirmed only partly for journals from the second quartile, and would not be confirmed for journals ranked into the third quartile. This shows that open access is not a sufficient condition for citation, but increases the number of citations for articles published in journals with high impact.     

The growth of knowledge and literature in neuroscience

Knowledge and literature of neuroscience started growing steadily during the last few centuries. This paper aims to study the growth of knowledge in neuroscience as well as its literature. The first part of the paper, enumerates a historical survey of the growth of knowledge based on published data. This is done in view of the fact that a consolidated information at one place will be of great value to the students of scientometrics and also to the research scholars who are desirous to undertake research in this discipline. The second part of the paper is entirely based on experimental data which were collected to analyse the growth of literature of the subject.Neuroscience is notable for its wide range of approaches and techniques. In no other branch of research such a manysided approach is so essential. As a consequence last few decades have witnessed an accelerated research tempo and unprecedented growth of the literature on the subject covering its different sub-fields with gradual and systematic transgression of the conventional boundaries between them. To cope with the growth of literature, a new bibliometric technique has been applied to rank periodicals in the field based on 5785 citation data collected from the bibliographic data base published in the source journal namely,Annual Review of Neuroscience. It is expected that this list will reflect the impact of literature on the advancement of knowledge in the field of neuroscience. A striking feature of this study is the comparatively small contribution (8.8%) coming from the application of biochemical techniques and concepts to neuroscience research which differs from what we had noted earlier in the case of other biomedical disciplines. High position occupied by multidisciplinary science journals brings out the significance of new neuroscience research to science as a whole and confirms the importance of this category of journals in the dissemination of knowledge for the overall growth of science. Relatively low proportion, of citations of journals of medicine, both general as well as specialities, in spite of direct relevance of much work in this field to neurological and mental illness reflects the preponderance of interest in the funcamental aspects of neuroscience research. Like other biomedical disciplines neuroscience literature also exhibits English as the most-preferred lingua franca of the subject; dominance of journals published from USA, UK, Germany and the Netherland; a wide scatter of cited literature showing the multidisciplinary approach characteristic of present-day neuroscience research. The results of this study support Bradford's Law of Scattering and also Sengupta's Law of Bibliometrics. It is expected that the present ranking list will be of great help to the working neuroscientists to select a handful of core periodicals in the field for regular browsing from the viewpoint of their importance and significance as these core journals identify maximum segment of contemporary literature on the topics of direct relevance to their day to day research in the field.     

Ranking scientific publications considering the aging characteristics of citations

Ranking the significance of scientific publications has been a challenging topic for a long time. So far, many ranking methods have been proposed, one of which is the well-known PageRank algorithm. In this paper, we introduce aging characteristics to the PageRank algorithm via considering only the first 10 year citations when aggregating resource from different nodes. The validation of our new method is performed on the data of American Physical Society journals. The results indicate that taking into account aging characteristics improves the performance of the PageRank algorithm in terms of ranking accuracy for both papers and authors. Though our method is only applied to citation networks in this paper, it can be naturally used in many other real systems and similar improvements are expected.

     

A deductive approach to select or rank journals in multifaceted subject, Oceanography

Whether singleton approach (citation analysis of identified source journals) used by Gross and Gross (Science 66(1713):385?C389, 1927) or differential approach (citation analysis of articles in specific subject field) applied by Bradford (Engineering 137:85?C86, 1934) suitable to select or rank journals in multifaceted subject????Oceanography?? is presented. This study discusses both the approaches analyzing citations of published literature in oceanography from 30 countries. The ranking correlation of journals showed better positive correlation (lowest ???=?0.662 for 2005?C2009 to highest ???=?0.817 for 1995?C1999) when top ranked journals from the list generated complying Gross and Gross approach (GA) were correlated with same journal titles of the list generated complying Bradford approach than the other way (lowest ???=?0.588 for 2005?C2009 to highest ???=?0.726 for 1990?C1994). Both the approaches matched similar number of journals to country-wise lists and give unbiased choice in preferring a ranking list. The journals distribution graphs showed typical Bradford?CLeimkuhler curves in both the approaches for all the datasets. But the groos droop appears comparatively early with shorter straight line in GA. The high clustering of literature to limited number of journals is a disadvantage in multifaceted subject. So the differential approach used by Bradford is being considered suitable for multifaceted subject like, ??Oceanography??.     

A ranking of supply chain management journals based on departmental lists

The issue of journal rankings has been an issue of frequent debate, likely due to the effect rankings can have on academic careers. While many rankings have been done over the years, few, if any, take into account what really matters to academics’ careers, how their own departments evaluate their research. This study collected department journal ranking lists from top international supply chain programmes. The resulting data, approximately 70% US and 30% international, presents a diverse perspective on the journals considered when analysing research productivity. A cluster analysis is performed and the results are compared with impact factors for select journals; we also discuss the differences highlighted between perceived rankings based on the departments’ geographic location. The results show that the field still has some divisions.     

Validation of Bibliometric Indicators in the Field of Microbiology: A Norwegian Case Study

This paper addresses two related issues regarding the validity of bibliometric indicators for the assessment of national performance within a particular scientific field. Firstly, the representativeness of a journal-based subject classification; and secondly, the completeness of the database coverage. Norwegian publishing in microbiology was chosen as a case, using the standard ISI-product National Science Indicators on Diskette (NSIOD) as a source database. By applying an "author-gated" retrieval procedure, we found that only 41 percent of all publications in NSIOD-indexed journals, expert-classified as microbiology, were included under the NSIOD-category Microbiology. Thus, the set of defining core journals only is clearly not sufficient to delineate this complex biomedical field. Furthermore, a subclassification of the articles into different subdisciplines of microbiology revealed systematic differences with respect to representation in NSIOD's Microbiology field; fish microbiology and medical microbiology are particularly underrepresented.In a second step, the individual publication lists from a sample of Norwegian microbiologists were collected and compared with the publications by the same authors, retrieved bibliometrically. The results showed that a large majority (94%) of the international scientific production in Norwegian microbiology was covered by the database NSIOD. Thus, insufficient subfield delineation, and not lack of coverage, appeared to be the main methodological problem in the bibliometric analysis of microbiology.     

Hierarchical clustering of mathematical journals based upon citation matrices

Journal-to-journal citation matrices can be examined with a two-stage double-standardization and hierarchical clustering procedure that has been widely applied to other transaction flow tables. An illustration is given, using 1967–1975 citations between 22 mathematical journals. Groups oriented to analysis and to algebra are discerned. Certain journals, such as theProceedings of the American Mathematical Society, are shown to have broad, nonspecialized tjes with the other periodicals.     

Does the Financial Times FT50 journal list select the best management and economics journals?

Scientometrics - The ranking of academic journals and the considerable impact of journal lists have been increasingly criticized, especially in management research. To assess the effectiveness of...     

Methodology for the evaluation of scientific journals: Aggregated Citations of Cited Articles

The criteria for the evaluation of scientific journals have changed from characteristics of its contents to citations of articles. Among many problems associated with citation-based evaluation methods are that it is applicable only to a limited number of journals, preferential selection of citable documents, differential values to citations, time duration for assessment, etc. The proposed index, Aggregated Citations of Cited Articles (ACCA), is calculated based on citations data, derived from only of cited articles, and therefore can be validated from standard database. While giving more importance to citations, the number of cited articles published in a journal also has some influence in the new index. The calculated values are consistent with time and can be used to back-track the status of a journal in its past and for continued evaluation. The new Index ensures neutrality, qualitative and quantitative hierarchy and consistency in the estimation of journal ranking.     

A new methodology for ranking scientific institutions

This paper examines policy-relevant effects of a yearly public ranking of individual researchers and their institutes in economics by means of their publication output in international top journals. In 1980, a grassroots ranking (‘Top 40’) of researchers in the Netherlands by means of their publications in international top journals started a competition among economists. The objective was to improve economics research in the Netherlands to an internationally competitive level. The ranking lists did stimulate output in prestigious international journals. Netherlands universities tended to perform well compared to universities elsewhere in the EU concerning volume of output in ISI source journals, but their citation impact was average. Limitations of ranking studies and of bibliometric monitoring in the field of economics are discussed.     

Neophilia ranking of scientific journals

The ranking of scientific journals is important because of the signal it sends to scientists about what is considered most vital for scientific progress. Existing ranking systems focus on measuring the influence of a scientific paper (citations)—these rankings do not reward journals for publishing innovative work that builds on new ideas. We propose an alternative ranking based on the proclivity of journals to publish papers that build on new ideas, and we implement this ranking via a text-based analysis of all published biomedical papers dating back to 1946. In addition, we compare our neophilia ranking to citation-based (impact factor) rankings; this comparison shows that the two ranking approaches are distinct. Prior theoretical work suggests an active role for our neophilia index in science policy. Absent an explicit incentive to pursue novel science, scientists underinvest in innovative work because of a coordination problem: for work on a new idea to flourish, many scientists must decide to adopt it in their work. Rankings that are based purely on influence thus do not provide sufficient incentives for publishing innovative work. By contrast, adoption of the neophilia index as part of journal-ranking procedures by funding agencies and university administrators would provide an explicit incentive for journals to publish innovative work and thus help solve the coordination problem by increasing scientists’ incentives to pursue innovative work.     

Introducing the Current Contribution Index for characterizing the recent,relevant impact of journals

The Garfield (Impact) Factor characterizes the measure of the up to date specific contribution of scientific journals to the total impact of the journals in a special field. A new indicator (Current Contribution Index, CCI) was introduced in order to characterize the relative contribution of journals to recent, relevant knowledge of a corresponding field. The CC Index relates the number of citations received by a journal in a given year to the total number of citations obtained by all journals of the corresponding field in that year. Mean Garfield Factors and mean Current Contribution Indexes were calculated for some fields and several journals. No significant correlation was found between the Garfield Factor (GF) and Current Contribution Index (CCI) of journals. The ratios of the GF to CCI referring to the corresponding top 10, 20 or 50 per cent of the journals ranked by decreasing GF and CCI, strongly differ by field.     

Cognitive consensus in recent mainstream American sociology: An empirical analysis

A number of observers have commented that American sociology has recently experimenced a shift in its cognitive structure. In order to empirically investigate these observations, citations in the two most prominent sociological journals during 1955 and 1970 are examined. The data indicate that (a) various theory groups account for a relatively small percentage of authors cited during either period, (b) a number of the earlier theory groups are less prominent than they once were, and (c) there is evidence of the emergence of one new theory group.     

The matthew index—Concentration patterns and Matthew core journals

In this paper we extend our studies to the micro-structure of the Matthew effect for countries (MEC). The MEC allows the ranking of countries by their Matthew Index. The rank distribution of countries, observable only at a macro-level, has its roots in re-distribution processes of citations in every journal of the database. These re-distributed citations we call Matthew citations. Data for 44 countries and 2712 journals (based on theScience Citation Index) are analyzed. The strength of the contribution of the individual journals to the MEC (their number of Matthew citations) is skewly distributed. Due to this high concentration of the MEC we are able to define a new type of journal the Matthew core journal: 145 Matthew core journals account for 50% of the MEC. These journals carry a high potential of gaining a surplus of citations over what is expected and the risk of losing a high number of citations as well.     

The effect of additional citations in the stability of Journal Citation Report categories

We use a new approach to study the ranking of journals in JCR categories. The objectives of this study were to empirically evaluate the effect of increases in citations on the computation of the journal impact factor (JIF) for a large set of journals as measured by changes in JIF, and to ascertain the influence of additional citations on the rank order of journals according their new JIFs within JCR groups. To do so, modified JIFs were computed by adding additional citations to the number used by Thomson-Reuters to compute the JIF of journals listed in the JCR for 2008. We considered the effect on rank order of a given journal of adding 1, 2, 3 or more citations to the number used to compute the JIF, keeping everything else equal (i.e., without changing the JIF of other journals in a given group). The effect of additional citations on the internal structure of rankings in JCR groups increased with the number of citations added. In about one third of JCR groups, about half the journals changed their rank order when 1–5 citations were added. However, in general the rank order tended to be relatively stable after small increases in citations.     

Journal report card

The impact factor is one of the most used scientometric indicators. Its proper and improper uses have been discussed extensively before. It has been criticized extensively, yet it is still here. In this paper I propose the journal report card, which is a set of measures, each with an easily comprehensible meaning that provides a fuller picture of the journals?? standing. The set of measures in the report card include the impact factor, the h-index, number of citations at different points on the ranked list of citations, extent of uncitedness and coverage of the h-core. The report card is computed for two sets of journals, the top-20 journals in JCR 2010 and the top-20 journals in JCR 2010 for the category Information and Library Science.     

Are leaders really leading? Journals that are first in Web of Science subject categories in the context of their groups

This study focuses on journals that lead their Web of Science (WoS) subject category ranking when the usual 2-year window for the Journal Impact Factor (JIF2) is used as the ranking variable, and examines evidence that contradicts their top-ranked position in the context of their group. The source data were obtained from all 177 WoS subject categories in the Science Edition 2015 Journal Citation Reports (JCR). I compared journals in each WoS subject category with leaders in terms of JIF2, number of citable items and number of citations that contribute to the JIF2. Rankings were calculated with alternative metrics (for example, the Journal Impact Factor without self-citations and the eigenfactor), and the minimum reduction in the number of citations that would displace the top-ranked journal from its leading position was also calculated. In addition, the stability of rankings over time, the number of WoS subject categories in which journals are leaders, the publishers that own leading journals, and the percentages of research articles (as opposed to review articles) published in different journals were also studied. In general, leading journals are not necessarily the top-ranked in terms of citations received or the number of citable items they publish. In addition, most leaders maintained their position when other metrics were used instead the JIF2, although rankings based on the eigenfactor were at variance with this finding. The distribution of publishers was highly skewed, with a linear relationship between the cumulative number of publishers owning the top-ranked journal and the cumulative number of WoS subject categories. In only 85 subject categories (48%) the percentage of research articles (not reviews) in the number of citable items was greater than the mean percentage for the subject category. In 31 instances, leaders did not publish any research articles, but only reviews.     

Journal self-citations that contribute to the impact factor: Documents labeled “editorial material” in journals covered by the Science Citation Index

Summary We investigated the distribution of citations included in documents labeled by the ISI as “editorial material” and how they contribute to the impact factor of journals in which the citing items were published. We studied all documents classified by the ISI as “editorial material” in the Science Citation Index between 1999 and 2004 (277,231 records corresponding to editorial material published in 6141 journals). The results show that most journals published only a few documents that included 1 or 2 citations that contributed to the impact factor, although a few journals published many such documents. The data suggest that manipulation of the impact factor by publishing large amounts of editorial material with many citations to the journal itself is not a widely used strategy to increase the impact factor.