The relationship between international editorial board composition and citation measures in political science,business, and genetics journals

Three measures of international composition on journal editorial boards - the number of countries represented on the board, the number of international members, and the proportion of international board members - were correlated with impact factor and total citation data in the 1999 Journal Citation Reportsfor 153 business, political science, and genetics journals. With a few exceptions the relationship between international editorial board composition and citation measures was non-linear, leading to the conclusion that international membership on the editorial board can not generally be used as a marker of better journal quality. Yet further investigation is warranted due to positive correlations between some editorial board and citation measures for non-U.S. business and political science journals. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Assessing internationality of scholarly journals through foreign authorship patterns: the case of major journals in information science,and scientometrics

This article reports findings from a study of patterns of foreign authorship of articles, and international composition of journal editorial boards in five leading journals in the field of information science, and scientometrics. The study covers an American journal and four European journals. Bibliographic data about foreign authors and their national affiliation from five selected years of publication were analyzed for all journals. The foreign input of articles were extremely high in Information Processing & Management, and Scientometrics, and were relatively low in the other three journals. The number of foreign countries contributing in all journals have increased rapidly since 1996. Canada, England, Belgium, Netherlands, China, and Spain were the countries with high contributions in JASIST. The authors from the USA have dominated the foreign-authored articles in all European journals. A simple linear regression analysis showed that 60% of variation in the proportion of foreign-authored articles in the set of five journals over the selected years could be explained by the percentage of foreign members on the editorial boards of the journals. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Influence of international authorship on citations in Brazilian medical journals: a bibliometric analysis

Scientometrics - The challenge of increasing the impact of regional journals has received much attention. While funding and research agencies require the acceptance of papers from foreign authors...     

Indices of journal citation relatedness and citation relationships among aquatic biology journals

Simple quantitative indices of pair-wise journal citation relatedness (based on the numbers of references given to and received from a journal title, which are provided by Science Citation Index database) are translated by an automatic clustering procedure into a meaningful map diagram reflecting topical relatedness of journals within a field of science. Such a map for 60 journals in marine and freshwater biology and related sciences published in 1987 reveals a tight cluster of marine biology journals quite distinct from the freshwater biology journal cluster and from the fisheries cluster. The journals within the marine biology cluster and those with strongest pair-wise links with them can be regarded as the core journals in marine biology. Indices of unilateral citation relatedness are used to obtain diagrams, which we term citograms. The citograms visualize patterns of citation relatedness of a journal (its citing and being cited). Journal self-citation can be meaningfully estimated using the bilateral index of relatedness. Self-citation is high in specialized or regional journal titles. It also appears to be quite substantial in journals of broader scope, which possibly reflect authors' subjective preferences.     

Exploring knowledge patterns of library and information science journals within the field: a citation analysis from 2009 to 2016

Scientometrics - A substantial number of studies have examined the journal quality and ranked them using academic survey, scientometric indicator, or citation analysis. This study aims to...     

Measuring the similarity between the reference and citation distributions of journals

The “Jaccardized Czekanowski index”, JCz, an indicator measuring the similarity between the cited and citing journal list of a given journal is proposed in the paper. It is shown that the indicator characterizes the network properties of individual journals and, in aggregated form, also that of subject categories or countries. For subject categories, JCz appears to be related to the multidisciplinarity of the category. For countries, the multinational or local character of the publishers seems to have determining role.     

Productivity,visibility, authorship,and collaboration in library and information science journals: Central and Eastern European authors

Scientometrics - From the bibliometric point of view, little is known about the development and status of library and information science (LIS) in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries....     

The editorial policies of scientific journals: Testing an impact factor model

There is an evident need for the most scrupulous assessment possibleof the fruits of research (in the context considered here; namely, publications)with a qualitative, hence in-depth analysis of the single products of . Butthis would require time and competences which not all policy makers have attheir disposal. Hopefully, quantitative procedures, apparently objective andeasy to apply, would be able to surmount these difficulties. The diffusionof the quantitative evaluation of research is, that is, the policy makers'adaptive response to the need to increase controls of the efficiency of publicspending in since public investment clearly could not be determined at theoutset on the basis of the market's spontaneous, decentralised balancingmechanisms. An essential step towards the prevention of the distortions mostlikely to result from quantitative evaluation is the adoption of quantitativeprocedures of evaluation of the editorial policies of scientific journals– or, rather, of journals which claim to be scientific. Such proceduresmust be designed to highlight any distortions caused by the non-optimal editorialpolicies of journals. With quantitative evaluation, in fact, journals playa crucial role in the formation of public science policies. They thus haveto be subjected to specific monitoring to make sure that their conduct fitsin with the prerequisites necessary for them to perform their semi-officialactivity as certifiers of the quality of the products of research. The phenomenaof the production, divulgation and fruition of scientific discovery are, ofcourse, so complex that it is necessary to weigh them not with a single indicator,however helpful it may be, but with a constellation of indicators. We receivedconfirmation of the reliability of the impact factor as an instrument to monitorthe quality of research and as a means of evaluating the research itself.This is a reassuring result for the current formulation of public policiesand confirms the substantial honesty of the competition mechanisms of thescientific enterprise. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A scientometric analysis of international LIS journals: Productivity and characteristics

This paper presents a quantitative study of productivity, characteristics and various aspects of global publication in the field of library and information science (LIS). A total of 894 contributions published in 56 LIS journals indexed in SSCI during the years of 2000-2004 were analyzed. A total of 1361 authors had contributed publications during the five years. The overwhelming majority (89.93%) of them wrote one paper. The average number of authors per paper is 1.52. All the studied papers were published in English. The sum of research output of the authors form USA and UK reaches 70% of the total productivity. Most papers received few citations. Each article received on an average 1.6 citations and the LIS researchers cite mostly latest articles. About 48% of citing authors had tendency of self-citation. The productive authors, their contribution and authorship position are listed to indicate their productivity and degree of involvement in their research publications.     

Discontinuities in citation relations among journals: self-organized criticality as a model of scientific revolutions and change

Scientometrics - Using 3-year moving averages of the complete Journal Citation Reports 1994–2016 of the Science Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index (combined), we analyze...     

Chinese communication studies: A citation analysis of Chinese communication research in English-language journals

The study employs citation analysis method to identify the disciplines and active research areas in communication studies on communication systems in China. Moreover, the study seeks to contribute to the methodological issues of citation analysis by including new variables in the analysis. Using Chinese communication research in 11 Chinese/Asian studies journals and 13 journalism/communication journals published in English since 1931, the study found that there were little exchanges between Chinese studies and communication scholars. Howerver, the study showed that by including two variables—theme of articles and academic affiliation of authors, the findings can more accurate demonstrate the relationship between the research activities and disciplines cited.     

The impact of qualitative methods on article citation: an international business research perspective

Scientometrics - Qualitative methods have traditionally been underused in international business, and their research potential in this area has not been widely investigated. The main objective of...     

Comparison of citation and usage indicators: the case of oncology journals

It is the objective of this article to examine in which aspects journal usage data differ from citation data. This comparison is conducted both at journal level and on a paper by paper basis. At journal level, we define a so-called usage impact factor and a usage half-life in analogy to the corresponding Thomson’s citation indicators. The usage data were provided from Science Direct, subject category “oncology”. Citation indicators were obtained from JCR, article citations were retrieved from SCI and Scopus. Our study shows that downloads and citations have different obsolescence patterns. While the average cited half-life was 5.6 years, we computed a mean usage half-life of 1.7 years for the year 2006. We identified a strong correlation between the citation frequencies and the number of downloads for our journal sample. The relationship was lower when performing the analysis on a paper by paper basis because of existing variances in the citation-download-ratio among articles. Also the correlation between the usage impact factor and Thomson’s journal impact factor was “only” moderate because of different obsolescence patterns between downloads and citations.     

Measuring the citation impact of research journals in clinical neurology: A structural equation modelling analysis

This study develops and tests an integrated conceptual model of journal evaluation from varying perspectives of citation analysis. The main objective is to obtain a more complete understanding of the external factors affecting journal citation impact; that is, a theoretical construct measured by a number of citation indicators. Structural equation modelling (SEM) with partial least squares (PLS) is used to test the conceptual model with empirical data from journals in clinical neurology. Interrelationships among journal citation impact and four external factors (journal characteristics, journal accessibility, journal visibility and journal internationality) have been successfully explored, and the conceptual model of journal evaluation has been examined. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Citation analysis and peer ranking of Australian social science journals

Citation analyses were performed for Australian social science journals to determine the differences between data drawn from Web of Science and Scopus. These data were compared with the tier rankings assigned by disciplinary groups to the journals for the purposes of a new research assessment model, Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), due to be implemented in 2010. In addition, citation-based indicators including an extended journal impact factor, the h-index, and a modified journal diffusion factor, were calculated to assess whether subsequent analyses influence the ranking of journals. The findings suggest that the Scopus database provides higher number of citations for more of the journals. However, there appears to be very little association between the assigned tier ranking of journals and their rank derived from citations data. The implications for Australian social science researchers are discussed in relation to the use of citation analysis in the ERA.     

Reception of integrative and complementary medicine (ICM) in scientific journals: a citation and co-word analysis

Even if integrative and complementary medicine (ICM) is a growing scientific field, it is also a highly contested area in terms of scientific legitimacy. The aim of this article is to analyze the reception of ICM research in scientific journals. Is this kind of research acknowledged outside the ICM context, for example, in general or specialized medicine? What is the impact of ICM research? and Is it possible to identify any shift in content, from the original ICM research to the documents where it is acknowledged? The material consisted of two sets: documents published in 12 ICM journals in 2007; and all documents citing these documents during the years 2007–2012. These sets were analyzed with help from citation and co-word analysis. When analyzing the citation pattern, it was clear that a majority of the cited documents were acknowledged in journals and documents that could be related to research areas outside the ICM context, such as pharmacology & pharmacy and plant science—even if the most frequent singular journals and subject categories were connected to ICM. However, after analyzing the content of cited and citing documents, it was striking how similar the content was. It was also evident that much of this research was related to basic preclinical research, in fields such as cell biology, plant pharmacology, and animal experiments.     

References,authors, journals and scientific disciplines underlying the sustainable development literature: a citation analysis

This paper identifies the main references, authors and journals influencing the sustainable development literature. The task is accomplished by means of a citation analysis based on the records of ISI Web of Science. We found that the core of sustainability thinking is framed by a pattern of landmark studies published around every 5 years. Only 380 publications have been cited at least ten times. References with the highest influence are those with a global dimension and large diffusion, such as Brundtland Commission’s “Our common future” (1987) and classics such as Meadows’ et al. “Limits to growth” (1972). The list of the most influential references over the period 1960–2005 is dominated by contributions from economics (particularly ecological economics) and environmental science, but includes many other disciplines such as urban planning, political sciences and sociology. References are also made to policy documents such as “Agenda 21”, one of the main outcomes of the Rio Summit in 1992. In analyzing citation trends, we found that classics, because of their high rates of citations per year, seem to have a more enduring and stable influence.     

Citation status of Turkish physics publications in foreign journals: A global analysis

We have studied the citation rates and characteristics of 572 Turkish physics publications that appeared in the source journals listed in theScience Citation Index (SCI) for the period 1982–1990 to drive the following results: The papers appeared in a set of 94 journals, and 68% of the total output went to 21 of these; half of which are journals of high impact. On the average, papers from Turkey that appeared in the American and European journals are cited at rates higher than the corresponding average papers. There has been a substantial shift of Turkish papers from European journals to American journals over the last few years. These changes are an example of the process by which science in a less developed country becomes integrated into the word scientific community.     

Large sex difference despite equal opportunity: authorship of over 3000 letters in exercise science and physical therapy journals over 56 years

Scientometrics - Letters to editors of journals are a hallmark of scientific debate and communication. Incidentally, letters also serve as a relatively unconfounded model to test for a potential...