Journal ranking

About: Journal ranking is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 558 publications have been published within this topic receiving 16790 citations. The topic is also known as: system for qualifying academic journals.

Citation analysis as a tool in journal evaluation.

Abstract: As a communications system, the network of journals that play a paramount role in the exchange of scientific and technical information is little understood Periodically since 1927, when Gross and Gross published their study (1) of references in 1 year’s issues of the Journal of the American Chemical Socie/y, pieces of the network have been illuminated by the work of Bradford (2), Allen (3), Gross and Woodford (4), Hooker (5), Henkle (6), Fussier (7), Brown (8), and others (9) Nevertheless, there is still no map of the journal network as a whok To date, studies of the network and of the interrelation of its components have been limited in the number of journak, the areas of scientific study, and the periods of time their authors were able to consider, Such shortcomings have not been due to any lack of purpose, insight, or energy on the part of investigators, but to the practical difficulty of compiling and manipulating manually the enormous amount of necessary data A solution to this problem of data is available in the data base used to produce the Science Citation Index ( SCI ) (10) The coverage of the SCI is international and multidisciplinary; it has grown from 600 journals in 1964 to 2400 journals in 1972, and now includes the world’s most important scientific and technical journals in mow disciplines The SCI is published quarterly and is cumulated annually and quinquennially, but the data base from which the volumes are compiled is maintained on magnetic tape and is updated weekly At the end of 1971, this data base contained more than 27 mi[tion references to about 10 million different published items These references appeared over the past decade in the footnotes and bibliographies of more than 2 million journal articles, communications, letters, and so on The data base is, thus, not only multidisciplinary, it covers a substantial period of time and, being in machine-readable form, is amenable to extensive manipulation by computer In 1971, the Institute for Scientfic Information (1S1) decided to undertake a systematic analysis of journal citation patterns across the whole of science and technology It began by extracting from the data base all references pobIished during the last quarter of 1969 in the 2200 journals then covered by the SCL The resultant sample was about 1 million citations of journals, books, reports, theses, and so forth To test whether this 3-month sample was representative of the year as a whole, it was matched against another sample made by selecting every 27th reference from the approximately 4 million references collected over the entire year The two samples were similar enough in scope (number of diflerent items cited) and detail (relative frequency of their citation by different journals) to

Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research

Abstract: Evaluating scientific quality is a notoriously difficult problem which has no standard solution. Ideally, published scientific results should be scrutinised by true experts in the field and given scores for quality and quantity according to established rules. In practice, however, what is called peer review is usually performed by committees with general competence rather than with the specialist's insight that is needed to assess primary research data. Committees tend, therefore, to resort to secondary criteria like crude publication counts, journal prestige, the reputation of authors and institutions, and estimated importance and relevance of the research field,1 making peer review as much of a lottery as of a rational process.2 3 On this background, it is hardly surprising that alternative methods for evaluating research are being sought, such as citation rates and journal impact factors, which seem to be quantitative and objective indicators directly related to published science. The citation data are obtained from a database produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia, which continuously records scientific citations as represented by the reference lists of articles from a large number of the world's scientific journals. The references are rearranged in the database to show how many times each publication has been cited within a certain period, and by whom, and the results are published as the Science Citation Index (SCI) . On the basis of the Science Citation Index and authors' publication lists, the annual citation rate of papers by a scientific author or research group can thus be calculated. Similarly, the citation rate of a scientific journal—known as the journal impact factor—can be calculated as the mean citation rate of all the articles contained in the journal.4 Journal impact factors, which are published annually in SCI Journal Citation Reports , are widely regarded as …

The influence of management journals in the 1980s and 1990s

Abstract: It is difficult to get a clear picture of the relative influence of management journals because previous studies have focused on a single sub-area in the field over a relatively restricted number of years, and/or have used inconsistent criteria to judge journal influence. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine journal influence using citations from 28 journals over the past two decades. The findings show that the top seven journals accounted for 61 percent of all of the citations in the journals included, and that the three journals that showed the greatest increase in influence over the past 20 years were AMJ, AMR, and SMJ. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.