Scholarly publications represent at least two benefits for the study of the scientific community as a social group. First, they attest of some form of relation between scientists (collaborations, mentoring, heritage,...), useful to determine and analyze social subgroups. Second, most of them are recorded in large data bases, easily accessible and including a lot of pertinent information, easing the quantitative and qualitative study of the scientific community. Understanding the underlying dynamics driving the creation of knowledge in general, and of scientific publication in particular can contribute to maintaining a high level of research, by identifying good and bad practices in science. In this article, we aim at advancing this understanding by a statistical analysis of publication within peer-reviewed journals. Namely, we show that the distribution of the number of papers published by an author in a given journal is heavy-tailed, but has lighter tail than a power law. Interestingly, we demonstrate (both analytically and numerically) that such distributions match the result of an modified preferential attachment process, where, on top of a Barabási-Albert process, we take finite career span of scientists into account.
The journal structure in the China Scientific and Technical Papers and Citations Database (CSTPCD) is analysed from three perspectives: the database level, the specialty level and the institutional level (i.e., university journals versus journals issued by the Chinese Academy of Sciences). The results are compared with those for (Chinese) journals included in the Science Citation Index. The frequency of journal-journal citation relations in the CSTPCD is an order of magnitude lower than in the SCI. Chinese journals, especially high-quality journals, prefer to cite international journals rather…
What do we really mean by a "good" scientific journal? Do we care more about the short-time impact of our papers, or about the chance that they will still be read and cited on the long run? Here I show that, by regarding a journal as a "virtual scientist" that can be attributed a time-dependent Hirsch h-index, we can introduce a parameter that, arguably, better captures the "persistency" of a scientific publication. Curiously, however, this parameter seems to depend above all on the "thickness" of a journal.
This paper proposes an indicator of journals' scientific prestige, the SJR indicator, for ranking scholarly journals based on citation weighting schemes and eigenvector centrality to be used in complex and heterogeneous citation networks such Scopus. Its computation methodology is described and the results after implementing the indicator over Scopus 2007 dataset are compared to an ad-hoc Journal Impact Factor both generally and inside specific scientific areas. The results showed that SJR indicator and JIF distributions fitted well to a power law distribution and that both metrics were strong…
Publishing scientific journals governed by editors relying on anonymous peer reviewing is slow (even one round of reviewing involves several communications between authors, editor and reviewers), partial (arguments of authors can hardly overrule those of reviewers) and not using all available scientific material (even the most thorough and insightful reviews remain for the eyes of authors and editors only). Here I propose a new concept for scientific journals that ensures rapid, impartial and comprehensive (RIC) publishing. RIC concept is based on implementation of two novel publishing princip…
In this research, a new indicator of disciplinarity-multidisciplinarity is developed, discussed and applied. EBDI is based on the combination of the frequency distribution of subject categories of journals citing or cited by the analysis unit and the spread and diversity of the citations among subject categories measured with Shannon-Wiener entropy. Its reproducibility, robustness and consistence are discussed. Four of the combinations of its values when applied to the cited and citing dimensions lead to a suggested taxonomy of the role that the studied unit might have in terms of the transfor…
Purpose: to provide a view and analysis of the immediate field of journals which surround a number of key heterodox economics journals. Design/methodology/approach: Using citation data from the Science and Social Science Citation Index, the individual and collective networks of a number of journals in this field are analyzed. Findings: The size and shape of the citation networks of journals can differ substantially, even if in a broadly similar category. Heterodox economics cannot (yet) be considered as an integrated specialty: authors in several journals in heterodox economics cite more from …
Aggregated journal-journal citation networks based on the Journal Citation Reports 2004 of the Science Citation Index (5968 journals) and the Social Science Citation Index (1712 journals) are made accessible from the perspective of any of these journals. The user is thus able to analyze the citation environment in terms of links and graphs. Furthermore, the local impact of a journal is defined as its share of the total citations in the specific journal's citation environments; the vertical size of the nodes is varied proportionally to this citation impact. The horizontal size of each node can …
We consider distributions of scientific journals impact factor. Analysing 9028 scientific journals with the largest impact factors, we found that the distribution of them is year-to-year stable (at least for analysed 2011-2013 years), and it has the character of the exponential Boltzmann distribution with the power law asymptotic (tail).
Nowadays impact factor is the significant indicator for journal evaluation. In impact factor calculation is used number of all citations to journal, regardless of the prestige of cited journals, however, scientific units (paper, researcher, journal or scientific organization) cited by journals with high impact factor or researchers with high Hirsch index are more important than objects cited by journals without impact factor or unknown researcher. In this paper was offered weighted impact factor for getting more accurate rankings for journals, which consider not only quantity of citations, but…
The aim of this note is to propose a definition of the scientific diversity and corollarly, a measure of the "interdisciplinarity" of collaborations. With respect to previous studies, the proposed approach consists of 2 steps : first, the definition of similarity between journals and second, these similarities are used to characterize the homogeneity (or, on the contrary the diversity) of a publication list (that can be for one individual or a team).
In the same way ecosystems tend to increase maturity by decreasing the flow of energy per unit biomass, we should move towards a more mature science by publishing less but high-quality papers and getting away from joining large teams in small roles. That is, we should decrease our scientific productivity for good.
The aggregated citation relations among journals included in the Science Citation Index provide us with a huge matrix which can be analyzed in various ways. Using principal component analysis or factor analysis, the factor scores can be used as indicators of the position of the cited journals in the citing dimensions of the database. Unrotated factor scores are exact, and the extraction of principal components can be made stepwise since the principal components are independent. Rotation may be needed for the designation, but in the rotated solution a model is assumed. This assumption can be le…
Scientific journals are the repositories of the gradually accumulating knowledge of mankind about the world surrounding us. Just as our knowledge is organised into classes ranging from major disciplines, subjects and fields to increasingly specific topics, journals can also be categorised into groups using various metrics. In addition to the set of topics characteristic for a journal, they can also be ranked regarding their relevance from the point of overall influence. One widespread measure is impact factor, but in the present paper we intend to reconstruct a much more detailed description b…
Today's scientific research is an expensive enterprise funded largely by taxpayers' and corporate groups' monies. It is a critical part in the competition between nations, and all nations want to discover fields of research that promise to create future industries, and dominate these by building up scientific and technological expertise early. However, our understanding of the value chain going from science to technology is still in a relatively infant stage, and the conversion of scientific leadership into market dominance remains very much an alchemy rather than a science. In this paper, we …
The empirical distribution function of citations to journal articles (EDF for short) can become the fundamental tool for analyzing the scientific journals. Endeavors at making bibliometric analysis independent of the intuition of average citation levels have led us to the study of qualitative properties of physics journals in the functional space of EDFs. We show that the structure of this space establishes the connections and relationships that determine the essential features of physics journals. The research provides an analysis of 240 physics journals indexed in Journal Citation Reports 20…
Whether a scientific paper is cited is related not only to the influence of its author(s) but also to the journal publishing it. Scientists, either proficient or tender, usually submit their most important work to prestigious journals which receives higher citations than the ordinary. How to model the role of scientific journals in citation dynamics is of great importance. In this paper we address this issue through two folds. One is the intrinsic heterogeneity of a paper determined by the impact factor of the journal publishing it. The other is the mechanism of a paper being cited which depen…
The aim of this report is to present a ranking of Nursing journals covered in Google Scholar Metrics (GSM), a Google product launched in 2012 to assess the impact of scientific journals from citation counts this receive on Google Scholar. Google has chosen to include only those journals that have published at least 100 papers and have at least one citation in a period of five years (2007-2011). Journal rankings are sorted by languages (showing the 100 papers with the greatest impact). This tool allows to sort by subject areas and disciplines, but only in the case of journals in English. In thi…
Nationally oriented scientific-scholarly journals are considered from a methodological-informetric viewpoint, analysing data extracted from Scimago Journal Rank based on Scopus. An operational definition is proposed of a journal's degree of national orientation based on the geographical distribution of its publishing or citing authors, and the role of international collaboration and a country's total publication output. A comprehensive analysis is presented of trends up until 2019 in national orientation and citation impact of national journals entering Scopus, extending outcomes in earlier st…
The impact factor has been extensively used in the last years to assess journals visibility and prestige. While the impact factor is useful to compare journals, the specificities of subfields visibility in journals are overlooked whenever visibility is measured only at the journal level. In this paper, we analyze the subfields visibility in a subset of over 450,000 Physics papers. We show that the visibility of subfields is not regular in the considered dataset. In particular years, the variability in subfields impact factor in a journal reached 75% of the average subfields impact factor. We a…
A new size-independent indicator of scientific journal prestige, the SJR2 indicator, is proposed. This indicator takes into account not only the prestige of the citing scientific journal but also its closeness to the cited journal using the cosine of the angle between the vectors of the two journals' cocitation profiles. To eliminate the size effect, the accumulated prestige is divided by the fraction of the journal's citable documents, thus eliminating the decreasing tendency of this type of indicator and giving meaning to the scores. Its method of computation is described, and the results of…
There is an overall perception of increased interdisciplinarity in science, but this is difficult to confirm quantitatively owing to the lack of adequate methods to evaluate subjective phenomena. This is no different from the difficulties in establishing quantitative relationships in human and social sciences. In this paper we quantified the interdisciplinarity of scientific journals and science fields by using an entropy measurement based on the diversity of the subject categories of journals citing a specific journal. The methodology consisted in building citation networks using the Journal …
Scientific journals are very important in recording the finding from researchers around the world. The recent media to disseminate scientific journals is PDF. On scheme to find the scientific journals over the internet is via metadata. Metadata stores information about article summary. Embedding metadata into PDF of scientific article will grant the consistency of metadata readness. Harvesting the metadata from scientific journal is very interesting field at the moment. This paper will discuss about scientific journal metadata harvesters involving XMP.
The instances of templates in Wikipedia form an interesting data set of structured information. Here I focus on the cite journal template that is primarily used for citation to articles in scientific journals. These citations can be extracted and analyzed: Non-negative matrix factorization is performed on a (article x journal) matrix resulting in a soft clustering of Wikipedia articles and scientific journals, each cluster more or less representing a scientific topic.
The editorial handling of papers in scientific journals as a human activity process is considered. Using recently proposed approaches of human dynamics theory we examine the probability distributions of random variables reflecting the temporal characteristics of studied processes. The first part of this paper contains our results of analysis of the real data about papers published in scientific journals. The second part is devoted to modeling of time-series connected with editorial work. The purpose of our work is to present new object that can be studied in terms of human dynamics theory and …
Physics is one of the most successful endeavors in science. Being a prototypic big science it also reflects the growing tendency for scientific collaborations. Utilizing 250,000 papers from ArXiv.org a prepublishing platform prevalent in Physics we construct large coauthorship networks to investigate how individual network positions influence scientific success. In this context, success is seen as getting a paper published in high impact journals of physical subdisciplines as compared to not getting it published at all or in rather peripheral journals only. To control the nested levels of auth…
Most researchers acknowledge an intrinsic hierarchy in the scholarly journals ('journal rank') that they submit their work to, and adjust not only their submission but also their reading strategies accordingly. On the other hand, much has been written about the negative effects of institutionalizing journal rank as an impact measure. So far, contributions to the debate concerning the limitations of journal rank as a scientific impact assessment tool have either lacked data, or relied on only a few studies. In this review, we present the most recent and pertinent data on the consequences of our…
This paper presents the results and further development of a survey sent to 11,799 Spanish faculty members and researchers from various fields of the social sciences and the humanities, obtaining a total of 45.6% (5,368 responses) usable answers. Respondents were asked (a) to indicate the three most important journals in their field and (b) to rate them on a 0-10 scale according to their quality. The information obtained has been synthesized in two indicators which reflect the perceived quality of journals. Once the values were obtained, the journals were categorized according to each indicato…
The number of citations received by authors in scientific journals has become a major parameter to assess individual researchers and the journals themselves through the impact factor. A fair assessment therefore requires that the criteria for selecting references in a given manuscript should be unbiased with respect to the authors or the journals cited. In this paper, we advocate that authors should follow two mandatory principles to select papers (later reflected in the list of references) while studying the literature for a given research: i) consider similarity of content with the topics in…
The two most used citation impact indicators in the assessment of scientific journals are, nowadays, the impact factor and the h-index. However, both indicators are not field normalized (vary heavily depending on the scientific category) which makes them incomparable between categories. Furthermore, the impact factor is not robust to the presence of articles with a large number of citations, while the h-index depends on the journal size. These limitations are very important when comparing journals of different sizes and categories. An alternative citation impact indicator is the percentage of …
Colombian scientific journals are poorly represented in international digital libraries; however, through Google Scholar (GS) it is possible to determine their use by the community. Between the years of 2003 and 2007 a classification of 185 Colombian journals indexed in the Colombian National Bibliographical Index (IBNP) was performed using the information provided by GS, basing categorization on size indicators, indexation and citation. The indicators were analyzed by grouping the journals in two general areas: sciences and social sciences. In each area, the indicators provided by the digital…
The launch of Google Scholar Metrics as a tool for assessing scientific journals may be serious competition for Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports, and for Scopus powered Scimago Journal Rank. A review of these bibliometric journal evaluation products is performed. We compare their main characteristics from different approaches: coverage, indexing policies, search and visualization, bibliometric indicators, results analysis options, economic cost and differences in their ranking of journals. Despite its shortcomings, Google Scholar Metrics is a helpful tool for authors and editors in ide…
Using three-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 links between citing and cited journals in terms of (1) whether discontinuities among the networks of consecutive years have occurred; (2) are these discontinuities relatively isolated or networked? (3) Can these discontinuities be used as indicators of novelty, change, and innovation in the sciences? We examine each of the N2 links among the N journals across the years. We find power-laws for the top 10,000 instances of…
Predatory journals that pretended to resemble refereed journals but are used for money-making purposes. Predatory publishers produce less quality scientific and research papers; it is a severe academic threat in scientific publications. Researchers are ensuring the quality of the journal and peer-reviewing process before submitting the manuscript. This paper aims to know the Indian Library and Information Science faculties awareness and knowledge about Predatory journals.
A statistical analysis of full text downloads of articles in Elseviers ScienceDirect covering all disciplines reveals large differences in download frequencies, their skewness, and their correlation with Scopus-based citation counts, between disciplines, journals, and document types. Download counts tend to be two orders of magnitude higher and less skewedly distributed than citations. A mathematical model based on the sum of two exponentials does not adequately capture monthly download counts. The degree of correlation at the article level within a journal is similar to that at the journal le…
Experience plays a critical role in crafting high impact scientific work. This is particularly evident in top multidisciplinary journals, where a scientist is unlikely to appear as senior author if they have not previously published within the same journal. Here, we develop a quantitative understanding of author order by quantifying this 'Chaperone Effect', capturing how scientists transition into senior status within a particular publication venue. We illustrate that the chaperone effect has different magnitude for journals in different branches of science, being more pronounced in medical an…
The citation potential is a measure of the probability of being cited. Obviously, it is different among fields of science, social science, and humanities because of systematic differences in publication and citation behaviour across disciplines. In the past, the citation potential was studied at journal level considering the average number of references in established groups of journals (for example, the crown indicator is based on the journal subject categories in the Web of Science database). In this paper, some characterizations of the author's scientific research through three different re…
The aggregated journal-journal citation matrix -based on the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) of the Science Citation Index- can be decomposed by indexers and/or algorithmically. In this study, we test the results of two recently available algorithms for the decomposition of large matrices against two content-based classifications of journals: the ISI Subject Categories and the field/subfield classification of Glaenzel & Schubert (2003). The content-based schemes allow for the attribution of more than a single category to a journal, whereas the algorithms maximize the ratio of within-category ci…
This study measures the tendency to publish in international scientific journals. For each of nearly 35 thousands Scopus-indexed journals, we derive seven globalization indicators based on the composition of authors by country of origin and other characteristics. These are subsequently scaled up to the level of 174 countries and 27 disciplines between 2005 and 2017. The results indicate that advanced countries maintain high globalization of scientific communication that is not varying across disciplines. Social sciences and health sciences are less globalized than physical and life sciences. C…
The purpose of this paper is to introduce a model for measuring the efficiency in managing peer-review of scientific manuscripts by editors. The approach employed is based on the assumption that the editorial aim is to manage publication with high efficiency, employing the least amount of editorial resources. Efficiency is defined in this research as a measure based on 7 variables. An on-line survey was constructed and editors of journals originating from Serbia regularly publishing articles in the field of chemistry were invited to participate. An evaluation of the model is given based on res…
Scientific journal publishers have over the past twenty-five years rapidly converted to predominantly electronic dissemination, but the reader-pays business model continues to dominate the market. Open Access (OA) publishing, where the articles are freely readable on the net, has slowly increased its market share to near 20%, but has failed to fulfill the visions of rapid proliferation predicted by many early proponents. The growth of OA has also been very uneven across fields of science. We report market shares of open access in eighteen Scopus-indexed disciplines ranging from 27% (agricultur…
We investigate how textual properties of scientific papers relate to the number of citations they receive. Our main finding is that correlations are non-linear and affect differently most-cited and typical papers. For instance, we find that in most journals short titles correlate positively with citations only for the most cited papers, for typical papers the correlation is in most cases negative. Our analysis of 6 different factors, calculated both at the title and abstract level of 4.3 million papers in over 1500 journals, reveals the number of authors, and the length and complexity of the a…
Two Decades of Scientific Misconduct in India: Retraction Reasons and Journal Quality among Inter-country and Intra-country Institutional Collaboration
This paper explores a new indicator of journal citation impact, denoted as source normalized impact per paper (SNIP). It measures a journal's contextual citation impact, taking into account characteristics of its properly defined subject field, especially the frequency at which authors cite other papers in their reference lists, the rapidity of maturing of citation impact, and the extent to which a database used for the assessment covers the field's literature. It further develops Eugene Garfield's notions of a field's 'citation potential' defined as the average length of references lists in a…
This article analyses the difference in timing between the online availability of articles and their corresponding print publication and how it affects two bibliometric indicators: Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and Immediacy Index. This research examined 18,526 articles, the complete collection of articles and reviews published by a set of 61 journals on Urology and Nephrology in 2013 and 2014. The findings suggest that Advance Online Publication (AOP) accelerates the citation of articles and affects the JIF and Immediacy Index values. Regarding the JIF values, the comparison between journals wi…
The goal is to study the prevalence of citajacked papers: papers in authentic scientific journals citing hijacked journals, in academic literature. A Citejacked detector was designed as a part of the Problematic Paper Screener (https://www.irit.fr/~Guillaume.Cabanac/problematic-paper-screener/citejacked) to trace if the references to articles originating from hijacked journals infiltrate scientific communication. A full-text search was performed between November 2021 and January 2022 in the Dimensions database using the name of 1 of the 12 hijacked journals. The analysis of the bibliography in…
Criticism of the conference model should be put in context. Evidences suggest that the essential features of this model have emerged as responses to challenges posed by current trends of scientific research and the impact of the new techno-economic paradigm, the age of Information and Communication Technology. This context seems indispensable when discussing today's problems of scientific evaluation, in particular the Conference vs. Journal (CvJ) debate. This debate, also, would benefit from systematic historical and sociological studies of these practices. In this note we briefly develop thes…
I here propose an index that links the number of papers a researcher has published with impact factors (IFs) of the journals that publish these papers. A researcher is said to have an index z if totally z of his/her papers are published in journals with IFs of at least z/2. The z-index, not meant to evaluate, compare and rank scientists, is a number that hopefully conveniently summarizes the number of publications in journals with high IFs.
The Internet-based encyclopaedia Wikipedia has grown to become one of the most visited web-sites on the Internet. However, critics have questioned the quality of entries, and an empirical study has shown Wikipedia to contain errors in a 2005 sample of science entries. Biased coverage and lack of sources are among the "Wikipedia risks". The present work describes a simple assessment of these aspects by examining the outbound links from Wikipedia articles to articles in scientific journals with a comparison against journal statistics from Journal Citation Reports such as impact factors. The resu…
In this study, the academic status of users of scientific publications in Mendeley is explored in order to analyse the usage pattern of Mendeley users in terms of subject fields, citation and readership impact. The main focus of this study is on studying the filtering capacity of Mendeley readership counts compared to journal citation scores in detecting highly cited WoS publications. Main finding suggests a faster reception of Mendeley readerships as compared to citations across 5 major field of science. The higher correlations of scientific users with citations indicate the similarity betwee…
The evaluation of journals based on their influence is of interest for numerous reasons. Various methods of computing a score have been proposed for measuring the scientific influence of scholarly journals. Typically the computation of any of these scores involves compiling the citation information pertaining to the journal under consideration. This involves significant overhead since the article citation information of not only the journal under consideration but also that of other journals for the recent few years need to be stored. Our work is motivated by the idea of developing a computati…
Academic publishers claim that they add value to scholarly communications by coordinating reviews and contributing and enhancing text during publication. These contributions come at a considerable cost: U.S. academic libraries paid $1.7 billion for serial subscriptions in 2008 alone. Library budgets, in contrast, are flat and not able to keep pace with serial price inflation. We have investigated the publishers' value proposition by conducting a comparative study of pre-print papers and their final published counterparts. This comparison had two working assumptions: 1) if the publishers' argum…
Academic publishers claim that they add value to scholarly communications by coordinating reviews and contributing and enhancing text during publication. These contributions come at a considerable cost: U.S. academic libraries paid $1.7 billion for serial subscriptions in 2008 alone. Library budgets, in contrast, are flat and not able to keep pace with serial price inflation. We have investigated the publishers' value proposition by conducting a comparative study of pre-print papers from two distinct science, technology, and medicine (STM) corpora and their final published counterparts. This c…
The first part of our work is connected with the analysis of typical random variables for the specific human-initiated process. We study the data characterizing editorial work with received manuscripts in several scientific journals. In such a way we found the waiting time distributions that could be called the typical for an ordinary peer-review scientific journal. In the second part of this study a model of editorial processing of received manuscripts is developed. Within the model, different scenarios of the manuscript editorial processing are examined. Combining the results of the quantita…
