LIS journals scientific impact and subject categorization: a comparison between Web of Science and Scopus

The study compares the coverage, ranking, impact and subject categorization of Library and Information Science journals, specifically, 79 titles based on data from Web of Science (WoS) and 128 titles from Scopus. Comparisons were made based on prestige factor scores reported in 2010 Journal Citation Reports and SCImago Journal Rank 2010 and noting the change in ranking when the differences are calculated. The rank normalized impact factor and the Library of Congress Classification System were used to compare impact rankings and subject categorization. There was high degree of similarity in rank normalized impact factor of titles in both WoS and Scopus databases. The searches found 162 journals, with 45 journals appearing in both databases. The rankings obtained for normalized impact scores confirm higher impact scores for titles covered in Scopus because of its larger coverage of titles. There was mismatch of subject categorization among 34 journal titles in both databases and 22 of the titles were not classified under Z subject headings in the Library of Congress catalogue. The results revealed the changes in journal title rankings when normalized, and the categorization of some journal titles in these databases might be incorrect.     

Import-export of knowledge between scientific subject categories: The iceberg hypothesis

The capacity to attract citations from other disciplines — or knowledge export — has always been taken into account in evaluating the quality of scientific papers or journals. Some of the JCR’s (ISI’s Journal Citation Report) Subject Categories have a greater exporting character than others because they are less isolated. This influences the rank/JIF (ISI’s Journal Impact Factor) distribution of the category. While all the categories fit a negative power law fairly well, those with a greater External JIF give distributions with a more sharply defined peak and a longer tail — something like an iceberg. One also observes a major relationship between the rates of export and import of knowledge.     

Comparison of the effect of mean-based method and z-score for field normalization of citations at the level of Web of Science subject categories

Field normalization is a necessary step in a fair cross-field comparison of citation impact. In practice, mean-based method (m-score) is the most popular method for field normalization. However, considering that mean-based method only utilizes the central tendency of citation distribution in the normalization procedure and dispersion is also a significant characteristic, an open and important issue is whether alternative normalization methods which take both central tendency and variability into account perform better than mean-based method. With the aim of collapsing citation distributions of different fields into a universal distribution, this study compares the normalization effect of m-score and z-score based on 236 Web of Science (WoS) subject categories. The results show that both m-score and z-score have remarkable normalization effect as compared with raw citations, but neither of them can realize the ideal goal of “universality of citation distributions”. The results also suggest that m-score is generally preferable to z-score. The essential cause that m-score has an edge over z-score as a whole has a direct relationship with the characteristics of skewed citation distributions in which case m-score is more applicable than z-score.     

Biographical articles in scientific literature: analysis of articles indexed in Web of Science

Biographical articles in scientific journals offer a platform for the commemoration of distinguished individuals from the world of science. Despite so important a role for the scientific community, research on biographical articles is scarce. To fill this gap, we have analyzed 190,350 biographical articles indexed in Web of Science, written by 251,908 authors in 1945–2014. We have analyzed the development of this article type over the studied period and research areas, how women and men are represented in the subject of articles, and who the authors are. Over the time the number of biographical articles has been increasing, with the highest number in Life Sciences and Biomedicine. Around 20% of the articles were written about women, with the highest share of 24% in Arts and Humanities. Both male and female authors write more often about men than about women, a stable situation for the last 70 years.     

The subject composition of the world's scientific journals

A country by subject count of the serial periodical collection at the British Library Lending Division (BLLD) in 1973 is reported and compared to previous counts. Approximately 25 000 periodicals have titles indicating that they are scientific journals in nine fields of the physical and biological sciences, engineering, and mathematics. The overall subject distribution of the journals appears to be remarkably stable when compared to a similar count byHulme 60 years ago, although the number of journals appears to have doubled in the last 60 years. A major shift was found in the national origin of the journals, when compared withHulme's counts, with a notable rise in the number and percent of U.S. journals, and a sharp decline in the percentage of French and German journals.     

The role of scientific advisers in the strategic defense initiative

This paper compares the strategic and technical debate about the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to the ABM debate of 1968–1972. One major difference is the commitment of the President to support SDI; those who apparently influenced the President on this matter came from outside the ranks of his usual military and diplomatic advisers. In Congress, science advisers are less influential now than they were in the past, due to the strengthening of Congressional staffs and agencies, the growth of scientific interest groups, and the dimished novelty of their appearances in Congress. In light of the history of the ABM, the US should be careful to ensure that the financial and technical commitments to SDI do not automatically imply a commitment to deploy a strategic defense system.     

An extensive analysis of the presence of altmetric data for Web of Science publications across subject fields and research topics

Scientometrics - Sufficient data presence is one of the key preconditions for applying metrics in practice. Based on both Altmetric.com data and Mendeley data collected up to 2019, this paper...     

A two-step deep learning approach to data classification and modeling and a demonstration on subject type relationship analysis in the Web of Science

Scientometrics - It is common sense that some subjects have strong relationships while others are perhaps almost mutually independent, but a quantitative and systematic approach to describe such...     

Web of Science and Scopus language coverage

Scientometrics - The evaluation of research outputs in the form of journal articles is important to help with monitoring performance and to allocate funds. Elsevier’s Scopus and...     

Disparities in document indexation in two databases (Scopus and Web of Science) among six subject domains,and the impact on journal-based metrics

A previous study (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03457-x) found a discrepancy between Elsevier’s CiteScore and Clarivate Analytics’ Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in library and information science (LIS) journals. One possibility to explain this discrepancy may lie in the number and type of documents used to calculate these journal-based metrics. Using the top quartile of Scopus-indexed journals from 2011 to 2018, we assessed the number of documents for each journal and year that were indexed in Scopus and in Web of Science (WoS) in six fields of study: LIS, discrete mathematics and combinatorics (DMC), medicine: epidemiology (ME), agriculture and biological sciences (ABS), social science: demography (SSD), and environmental engineering (EE). The number of documents in WoS was higher than those indexed in Scopus for four fields of study: LIS, ME, SSD and EE, with a difference of 1653, 3931, 635 and 197 documents, respectively. For DMC and ABS, Scopus listed more documents than WoS for the same years and journals, the differential being 7 and 1284, respectively. The greater indexing of documents in WoS than in Scopus in four fields of study may explain why the JIF of top-ranking LIS journals is different than their CiteScore. To verify this possibility, one category (DMC) was examined in detail. Of the 16 DMC journals examined, 91.1% were articles, while 8.9% of missing documents were corrections, an erratum, an editorial, an abstract report and in press articles. There were no significant differences between the citation patterns of the missing DMC journals’ documents in Scopus and WoS. Citations to missing documents may impact the CiteScore and JIF and should thus be properly indexed.

     

Non-SCI subject visibility of the Latin American scientific production in the health field

The purpose of this work was to analyse the non-Science Citation Index subject visibility of the Latin American production in the health field. The methodology used considered manual and automated retrieval of the Latin American journals, as covered by different conventional secondary sources. The IMLA/LILACS (Index Medicus Latinoamericano/Latin American Literature in the Health Sciences) database was used to obtain a master list of the sustained journals for the period 1979–1990. The selected journals were classified by subject content, following the scheme of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. A total of 221 journals were selected and a database was developed. The results corroborated the leadership of Brazil in the field. It was also found that the subject content had a strong trend toward the clinical, medicine field. The subject Medicine was head in the list, with seventy four journals. Several difficulties and barriers to the use of the IMLA/LILACS database were detected. The implications of the overall analysis of this study as affecting researchers, policy makers and data-base producers are stressed by the author.Paper presented at the Fourth International Conference on Bibliometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics in Berlin (Germany), September 11–15, 1993.     

A new model for the strategic management of inventories subject to peaks in market demand

This research work is aimed at analysing a production system under dynamic conditions. The focus is on determining the strategic inventory, defined as the minimum initial inventory level needed to fulfil a sudden peak of finished products demand, as well as the minimum allowed lapse of time between two consecutive peaks to avoid stockout. A background of theoretical results and a comprehensive survey of the literature are provided, structured through a classification framework. Furthermore a new model has been developed which explicitly considers production capacity limits. It actually represents the only nonlinear model throughout the research body of knowledge in this field and, at the same time, it is characterised by an outstanding level of simplicity, which allows theoretical results in a closed analytic form, on behalf of the implementation in real-life manufacturing environments.     

Science and scientific collaboration in South Africa: apartheid and after

Scientific collaboration is growing in its importance; more so in Asian and African countries. This paper examines the scenario of science and scientific collaboration in South Africa which had passed through the colonial and apartheid regimes before it became a democracy in 1994. South African science under distinct political periods moved through some difficult periods but it did not badly affect the progress and direction of South African science. Science and scientific collaboration continued to grow under its major political phases amidst serious challenges. Despite internal conflict and boycott by the international scientific community, South Africa could move onto a stable and steady path of growth in science and collaboration under apartheid which is being carried on in the new South Africa. Collaborative research is encouraged at various levels of knowledge production and in science. The importance science and scientific development is gaining in today’s South Africa is remarkable.     

DOI errors and possible solutions for Web of Science

As unique and permanent alphanumeric strings to identify objects, digital object identifier (DOI) has been increasingly used to identify academic publications. Previous studies have reported the incorrect assignment of a single DOI name to multiple papers in the Scopus database, yet it remains unknown if this also holds in other datasets. In this paper we found incorrect DOI names are also problematic in the Web of Science but with different errors of duplicate DOI names. Tentative solutions are proposed in the end.

     

How old is the Web? Characterizing the age and the currency of the European scientific Web

The aim of this paper is to model and study the age of the Web using a sample of about four million of web pages from the 16 European Research Area countries obtained during 2004 and 2005. Web page time-stamp (date when the web pages were created or last changed for last time), format and size in bytes data have been analysed. Several indicators are introduced to measure longitudinal aspects of the Web. Half-age is proposed as a measure of the age distribution because this is found to be exponential. “Web Update Index” and “Lifespan Index” are introduced to measure the changing rate of a small sample over time. Results show that the British Web space has the youngest Web pages while the Greek and Belgian ones have the oldest. The study also compared Web pages topics and found that Biology pages are more stable than Physics pages.     

Combining Web of Science and Scopus datasets in citation-based literature study

Scientometrics - Scientific research builds on previous studies and scientifically proven knowledge. Researchers must master the recent developments in the field when designing research to answer...     

Science in Africa: An overview of mainstream scientific output

The total scientific output of mainstream articles for the 15 most productive African countries for the period 1991 to 1997 was 45,080, with South Africa and Egypt publishing 15,725 and 10,433, respectively. The productions of these two top ranked countries varied little from 1991-1997 while others such as the Maghreb countries increased between 75-102%. Total contributions were mainly in the fields of Clinical Medicine (36%), Biology (17%), Chemistry (14%), and Biomedical Research (12%). Papers in international collaboration were overriding in Biomedical Research, Biology, Earth and Space Science, and Physics. Institutions in the US were the principal collaborators followed closely by those in France. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Trends in Russian research output indexed in Scopus and Web of Science

Scientometrics - Trends are analysed in the annual number of documents published by Russian institutions and indexed in Scopus and Web of Science, giving special attention to the time period...