A weightage formula to rerank periodicals in the field of microbiology

Ranking lists of periodicals in different scientific disciplines are generally based on the total number of citations derived from a group of source journals with equal weightage given to all citations irrespective of chronology. As a result, in all these ranking lists, the position occupied by the post-war journals, may not be an accurate index of their demand or usefulness to research workers in the concerned field. This may happen because the quantum of published literature in the new journals is limited by the period for which they have been in existence, which is in many cases less than 20 years. Moreover, many of the post-war journals appearing in all these recent ranking lists have started publication even after 1960s, and their enumerated citations cover in fact a variable period of less than 20 years unlike in the case of pre-war journals. To avoid such discriminating against new journals which necessarily have fewer citation credits Sengupta suggested earlier an off-setting weightage formula which has been applied in this paper to rerank microbiology periodicals. A revised ranking list in the field of microbiology has been recommended in preference to the earlier one compiled by Sengupta. Results and findings, after application of the weightage formula, have been presented and discussed in this paper.     

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.     

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??.     

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.     

The relationship between the author byline and contribution lists: a comparison of three general medical journals

The author byline is an indispensable component of a scientific paper. Some journals have added contribution lists for each paper to provide detailed information of each author’s role. Many papers have explored, respectively, the byline and contribution lists. However, the relationship between the two remains unclear. We select three prominent general medical journals: Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Annals of Internal Medicine (Annals), and PLOS Medicine (PLOS). We analyze the relationship between the author byline and contribution lists using four indexes. Four main findings emerged. First, the number, forms, and names of contribution lists significantly differed among the three journals, although they adopted the criteria of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Second, a U-shaped relationship exists between the extent of contribution and author order: the participation levels in contribution lists were highest for first authors, followed by last and second authors, and then middle authors with the lowest levels. Third, regarding the consistency between author order in the contribution list and byline, every contribution category has a high consistency in JAMA and Annals, while PLOS shows a low consistency, in general. Fourth, the three journals have a similar distribution for the first authors in the contribution category; the first author in the byline contributes the highest proportion, followed by the middle and second authors, and then the last author with the lowest proportion. We also develop recommendations to modify academic and writing practice: implement structured cross-contribution lists, unify formats and standards of contribution lists, draft the author contribution criteria in the social sciences and humanities, and consider author contribution lists in scientific evaluation.     

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.     

Measuring economic journals�� citation efficiency: a data envelopment analysis approach

This paper by using data envelopment analysis (DEA) and statistical inference evaluates the citation performance of 229 economic journals. The paper categorizes the journals into four main categories (A?CD) based on their efficiency levels. The results are then compared to the 27 ??core economic journals?? as introduced by Diamond (Curr Contents 21(1):4?C11, 1989). The results reveal that after more than 20 years Diamonds?? list of ??core economic journals?? is still valid. Finally, for the first time the paper uses data from four well-known databases (SSCI, Scopus, RePEc, Econlit) and two quality ranking reports (Kiel Institute internals ranking and ABS quality ranking report) in a DEA setting and in order to derive the ranking of 229 economic journals. The ten economic journals with the highest citation performance are Journal of Political Economy, Econometrica, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Finance, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity.     

On the impact of Gold Open Access journals

Gold Open Access (=Open Access publishing) is for many the preferred route to achieve unrestricted and immediate access to research output. However, true Gold Open Access journals are still outnumbered by traditional journals. Moreover availability of Gold OA journals differs from discipline to discipline and often leaves scientists concerned about the impact of these existent titles. This study identified the current set of Gold Open Access journals featuring a Journal Impact Factor (JIF) by means of Ulrichsweb, Directory of Open Access Journals and Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The results were analyzed regarding disciplines, countries, quartiles of the JIF distribution in JCR and publishers. Furthermore the temporal impact evolution was studied for a Top 50 titles list (according to JIF) by means of Journal Impact Factor, SJR and SNIP in the time interval 2000–2010. The identified top Gold Open Access journals proved to be well-established and their impact is generally increasing for all the analyzed indicators. The majority of JCR-indexed OA journals can be assigned to Life Sciences and Medicine. The success-rate for JCR inclusion differs from country to country and is often inversely proportional to the number of national OA journal titles. Compiling a list of JCR-indexed OA journals is a cumbersome task that can only be achieved with non-Thomson Reuters data sources. A corresponding automated feature to produce current lists “on the fly” would be desirable in JCR in order to conveniently track the impact evolution of Gold OA journals.     

Demand for Scientific Articles and Citations: An Example from the Institut de l'information scientifique et technique (France)

The patterns that appear in exchanges between researchers, scientific journal publications and the demand for scientific articles often intersect, but the logic behind each type of activity is not necessarily the same. Analyses of requests for scientific articles from document suppliers may help to interpret current developments in electronic publishing.This study of article requests to the Institut de l'information scientifique et technique (INIST) shows that, in France, document supply customers fall into three main categories: business, academic libraries and public research organisations, in descending order. Demand focuses mainly on medicine, pharmacology, biology and chemistry, and the distribution of articles is entirely in accordance with the laws of bibliometrics.A further comparative analysis shows a high reciprocal correlation (except in the physical sciences) between the 50 journals most frequently requested from INIST, and the 50 most frequently cited journals according to ISI (Institute for Scientific Information). The titles which did not appear in either one list or the other show that the most frequently cited physics journals are not necessarily requested from the document supplier, and that, conversely, some frequently requested journals are not often cited. It may therefore be assumed that a trade in electronic articles is likely to develop quite rapidly in disciplines which are common to both lists, although this would focus on reputed titles only, but that a different pattern of electronic document exchange would emerge for scientific literature in other disciplines.     

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.     

Towards the automation of address identification

A new semi-automatic method is presented to standardize or codify addresses, in order to produce bibliometric indicators from bibliographic databases. The hypothesis is that this new method is very trustworthy to normalize authors’ addresses, easy and quick to obtain. As a way to test the method, a set of already hand-coded data is chosen to verify its reliability: 136,821 Spanish documents (2006–2008) downloaded previously from the Web of Science database. Unique addresses from this set were selected to produce a list of keywords representing various institutional sectors. Once the list of terms is obtained, addresses are standardized with this information and the result is compared to the previous hand-coded data. Some tests are done to analyze possible association between both systems (automatic and hand-coding), calculating measures of recall and precision, and some statistical directional and symmetric measures. The outcome shows a good relation between both methods. Although these results are quite general, this overview of institutional sectors is a good way to develop a second approach for the selection of particular centers. This system has some new features because it provides a method based on the previous non-existence of master lists or tables and it has a certain impact on the automation of tasks. The validity of the hypothesis has been proved taking into account not only the statistical measures, but also considering that the obtaining of general and detailed scientific output is less time-consuming and will be even less due to the feedback of these master tables reused for the same kind of data. The same method could be used with any country and/or database creating a new master list taking into account their specific characteristics.     

Citation analysis significance of scientific journals

The application of methods of quantitative analysis makes it possible to evaluate the impact of scientific journals on one another. These methods are used to determine the significance of similar scientific journals by their cross-citations, taking into account data from theJournal Citation Reports (JCR). They also help to improve theJournal Citation Reports structure and widen its uses for the evaluation of scientific journals. The above methods are applied to analyse critically the principles of ranking journals in package 1 and the tabular contents ofJCR's packages 2 and 3, as well as to study frequency distributions of the journals both in time and space.     

Citedness and uncitedness of cancer articles

There is a rapid growth of cancer literature. Thousands of papers are being regularly published every year not only in speciality journals, but also in journals of other disciplines. Citation studies are nowadays considered a major basis of science indicators for ascertaining the importance of a scientific journal and that of the published articles on a particular subject. In oncological research the journalCancer is considered as one of the top most journals and is universally well known for its high standard and excellence. In this paper an attempt has been made to find out the importance of all the articles published in it for a particular year. Side by side bibliometric analysis was made to ascertain various other aspects like time lag between publication and first citation of articles, average citation time, subject scattering and identification of most important journals in the field etc. It is believed that this study would be of help to the working oncologists, librarians and information scientists to assess the importance of articles published in a top ranking journal of cancer and also that of different journals publishing oncological research results.     

Journal ranking by selective impact. New method based on SDI results and journal impact factors

Selecting an appropriate set of scientific journals which best meets the users' needs and the dynamics of science requires usage of weight parameters by which journals can be ranked. Previous methods are based on the simple counting of relevant articles, or hits in SDI runs. The new method proposed combines hit numbers in SDI runs and journals' impact factors to a weight parameter called Selective Impact. The experimental results obtained show that ranking by Selective Impact leads to a higher quality of the conclusions to be drawn from journal rank distributions.     

A quantitative analysis of Turkish publication output in physics between 1938–1987

In the course of the study of scientific journal's rank distributions two new parameters are defined reflecting collective properties of journals in a network where the journals are linked to each other through co-usage of user profiles for which they contain relevant papers. The first, Collectivity C is a mere structure parameter whereas Selective Collectivity N·C uses C of a journal as a weight factor for the number of hits N produced in a retrospective search in a data file. The corresponding rank distributions show besides the expected reranking effect considerable deviations from a distribution where ranking is done according to the parameter Selective Journal Productivity N.     

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...     

科技论文中英文摘要的重要性

在我国几千种科技期刊中,被SCI及EI作为期刊源收录的期刊只有100多家,其中高校学报20多家.这并不能反映我国科技期刊的整体水平.究其原因,它同出版者不够重视与国外检索机构的联系、出版不及时、一稿多投造成期刊内容雷同等有关;但作者对中英文摘要的重要性认识不够,摘要不能说明论文研究的主要问题,英文摘要不符合英文表达习惯,从而导致这些研究成果不能被转摘或收录,也是一个重要原因.     

Authors’ sources of information: a new dimension in information scattering

The purpose of this study is to determine the usage patterns of core journals by scholars, and to address the differences among various academic disciplines. Thus, the references of 11,230 corresponding authors for the past 35?years from the world??s top five highly cited universities and institutions were analyzed. To build robust models of information scattering, we need a deeper understanding of this phenomenon. The results show that core journals usage is a social phenomenon, in exactly the same way as Bradford??s law, Zipf??s law and Lotka??s law. The analysis of author references shows that if core scientific journals are arranged in order of decreasing productivity, then they could be divided into a small group of highly cited periodicals and a large group of minimally cited ones. Scholars may do browsing and similar information-seeking activities to form their core journals, and the findings may support Bates??s hypothesis that Bradford??s core zone is best searched by browsing. Bradford??s law and relevant research may consequently help to solve many of the practical problems that practitioners of the profession face, particularly in collection development in libraries, and help users to gather highly scattered information.     

Characteristics of the publishing infrastructure of peripheral countries: A comparison of periodical publications from Latin America with periodicals from the US and the UK

Bibliometric research can provide science policy makers with indicators of the capacity of a country's national scientific system to produce printed information. The capacity of the local publishing industry to produce scientific and technical periodical publications reflects the availability of outlets for the dissemination of scientific findings. The present research attempts to evaluate the role of the publishing industry in the level of bibliographic control, and the level of peer review of periodical publications from Latin America. A random search was performed on the 1990 Cd-Rom version ofThe Serials Directory, a commercially produced international reference source on periodical publications. A sample of 311 periodicals from Latin America was downloaded to a local database. A similar search was performed on publications from the United States and the United Kingdom for comparison purposes. A random search of 235 publications was downloaded into a local database. Publishers were classified for both samples according to three types: academic, governmental, and commercial. Publications were sorted thematically and indicators of bibliographic control, and of peer review were recorded for both samples. Publications from Latin America showed a very low level of bibliographic control, particularly in the case of the assignment of ISSN numbers, where 58% of the sample studied was published without this element of bibliographic control. This contrasted sharply with the periodicals from the US and UK, where 83% (195) journals had an ISSN number assigned. The involvement of editorial boards in the academic quality of Latin American publications amounted only to 21% of the sample studied. Periodicals from the US and UK reported an editor as responsible for the journal in 40% (93) of the cases. This amount constitutes about double the number of editors reported by Latin American publications. Latin American academic publishers are the most numerous publishers in the sample studied accounting for 37% (114) of the journals studied however, 68% (77) of those editors printed periodicals without a named editor. Governmental publishers are the second largest publisher type. They produced 29% (89) of the journals in the sample. Commercial publishers are responsible for 26% (82) of the journals studied. Publications from the US and UK show a clear predominance of commercial publishers, accounting for 47% (111) of the journals. Academic publishers only produced 29% (68) of the 235 journals in the sample. This clear dominance of the commercial publisher sector shows that publishing in at least the two countries studied is clearly practised as a business enterprise. This is in sharp comparison to the publishing patterns exhibited in Latin America where the academic sector is the most prominent one.