The evolving landscape of open access (OA) journal publishing holds significant importance for policymakers and stakeholders who seek to make informed decisions and develop strategies that foster sustainable growth and advancements in open access initiatives within China. This study addressed the shortcomings of the current journal evaluation system and recognized the necessity of researching the elasticity of annual publication capacity (PUB) in relation to the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). By constructing an economic model of elasticity, a comparative analysis of the characteristics and dynamics of international OA journals from China and overseas was conducted. The analysis categorized OA journals based on their respective elasticity values and provided specific recommendations tailored to each category. These recommendations offer valuable insights into the development and growth potential of both OA journals from China and overseas. Moreover, the findings underscore the importance of strategic decision-making to strike a balance between quantity and quality in OA journal management. By comprehending the dynamic nature of elasticity, China can enhance its OA journal landscape, e
An exploratory, descriptive analysis is presented of the national orientation of scientific, scholarly journals as reflected in the affiliations of publishing or citing authors. It calculates for journals covered in Scopus an Index of National Orientation (INO), and analyses the distribution of INO values across disciplines and countries, and the correlation between INO values and journal impact factors. The study did not find solid evidence that journal impact factors are good measures of journal internationality in terms of the geographical distribution of publishing or citing authors, as the relationship between a journal's national orientation and its citation impact is found to be inverse U-shaped. In addition, journals publishing in English are not necessarily internationally oriented in terms of the affiliations of publishing or citing authors; in social sciences and humanities also USA has their nationally oriented literatures. The paper examines the extent to which nationally oriented journals entering Scopus in earlier years, have become in recent years more international. It is found that in the study set about 40 per cent of such journals does reveal traces of internati
We compare the network of aggregated journal-journal citation relations provided by the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2012 of the Science and Social Science Citation Indexes (SCI and SSCI) with similar data based on Scopus 2012. First, global maps were developed for the two sets separately; sets of documents can then be compared using overlays to both maps. Using fuzzy-string matching and ISSN numbers, we were able to match 10,524 journal names between the two sets; that is, 96.4% of the 10,936 journals contained in JCR or 51.2% of the 20,554 journals covered by Scopus. Network analysis was then pursued on the set of journals shared between the two databases and the two sets of unique journals. Citations among the shared journals are more comprehensively covered in JCR than Scopus, so the network in JCR is denser and more connected than in Scopus. The ranking of shared journals in terms of indegree (that is, numbers of citing journals) or total citations is similar in both databases overall (Spearman's \r{ho} > 0.97), but some individual journals rank very differently. Journals that are unique to Scopus seem to be less important--they are citing shared journals rather than bein
Defining and measuring internationality as a function of influence diffusion of scientific journals is an open problem. There exists no metric to rank journals based on the extent or scale of internationality. Measuring internationality is qualitative, vague, open to interpretation and is limited by vested interests. With the tremendous increase in the number of journals in various fields and the unflinching desire of academics across the globe to publish in "international" journals, it has become an absolute necessity to evaluate, rank and categorize journals based on internationality. Authors, in the current work have defined internationality as a measure of influence that transcends across geographic boundaries. There are concerns raised by the authors about unethical practices reflected in the process of journal publication whereby scholarly influence of a select few are artificially boosted, primarily by resorting to editorial maneuvres. To counter the impact of such tactics, authors have come up with a new method that defines and measures internationality by eliminating such local effects when computing the influence of journals. A new metric, Non-Local Influence Quotient(NLI
This study examines the social media uptake of scientific journals on two different platforms - X and WeChat - by comparing the adoption of X among journals indexed in the Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE) with the adoption of WeChat among journals indexed in the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD). The findings reveal substantial differences in platform adoption and user engagement, shaped by local contexts. While only 22.7% of SCIE journals maintain an X account, 84.4% of CSCD journals have a WeChat official account. Journals in Life Sciences & Biomedicine lead in uptake on both platforms, whereas those in Technology and Physical Sciences show high WeChat uptake but comparatively lower presence on X. User engagement on both platforms is dominated by low-effort interactions rather than more conversational behaviors. Correlation analyses indicate weak-to-moderate relationships between bibliometric indicators and social media metrics, confirming that online engagement reflects a distinct dimension of journal impact, whether on an international or a local platform. These findings underscore the need for broader social media metric frameworks that incorporate locally dom
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 than domestic ones. However, Chinese journals do not get an equivalent reception from their international counterparts. The international visibility of Chinese journals is low, but varies among fields of science. Journals of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have a better reception in the international scientific community than university journals.
Webology is an international peer-reviewed journal in English devoted to the field of the World Wide Web and serves as a forum for discussion and experimentation. It serves as a forum for new research in information dissemination and communication processes in general, and in the context of the World Wide Web in particular. This paper presents a Scientometric analysis of the Webology Journal. The paper analyses the pattern of growth of the research output published in the journal, pattern of authorship, author productivity, and subjects covered to the papers over the period (2013-2017). It is found that 62 papers were published during the period of study (2013-2017). The maximum numbers of articles were collaborative in nature. The subject concentration of the journal noted was Social Networking/Web 2.0/Library 2.0 and Scientometrics or Bibliometrics. Iranian researchers contributed the maximum number of articles (37.10%). The study applied standard formula and statistical tools to bring out the factual result.
This study aims to present a scientometric analysis of the journal titled Cognition for a period of 20 years from 1999 to 2018. The present study was conducted with an aim to provide a summary of research activity in current journal and characterize its most aspects. The research coverage includes the year wise distribution of articles, authors, institutions, countries and citation analysis of the journal. The analysis showed that 2870 papers were published in journal of Cognition from 1999 to 2018. The study identified top 20 prolific authors, institutions and countries of the journal. Researchers from USA have been made the most percentage of contributions.
Overlay journals are characterised by their articles being published on open access repositories, often already starting in their initial preprint form as a prerequisite for submission to the journal prior to initiating the peer-review process. In this study we aimed to identify currently active overlay journals and examine their characteristics. We utilised an explorative web search and contacted key service providers for additional information. The final sample consisted of 34 overlay journals. While the results show that new overlay journals have been actively established within recent years, the current presence of overlay journals remains diminutive compared to the overall number of open access journals. Most overlay journals publish articles in natural sciences, mathematics or computer sciences, and are commonly published by groups of academics rather than formal organisations. They may also rank highly within the traditional journal citation metrics. None of the investigated journals required fees from authors, which is likely related to the cost-effective aspects of the overlay publishing model. Both the growth in adoption of open access preprint repositories and researcher
Ageing of publications, percentage of self-citations, and impact vary from journal to journal within fields of science. The assumption that citation and publication practices are homogenous within specialties and fields of science is invalid. Furthermore, the delineation of fields and among specialties is fuzzy. Institutional units of analysis and persons may move between fields or span different specialties. The match between the citation index and institutional profiles varies among institutional units and nations. The respective matches may heavily affect the representation of the units. Non-ISI journals are increasingly cornered into "transdisciplinary" Mode-2 functions with the exception of specialist journals publishing in languages other than English. An "externally cited impact factor" can be calculated for these journals. The citation impact of non-ISI journals will be demonstrated using Science and Public Policy as the example.
Using "Analyze Results" at the Web of Science, one can directly generate overlays onto global journal maps of science. The maps are based on the 10,000+ journals contained in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) of the Science and Social Science Citation Indices (2011). The disciplinary diversity of the retrieval is measured in terms of Rao-Stirling's "quadratic entropy." Since this indicator of interdisciplinarity is normalized between zero and one, the interdisciplinarity can be compared among document sets and across years, cited or citing. The colors used for the overlays are based on Blondel et al.'s (2008) community-finding algorithms operating on the relations journals included in JCRs. The results can be exported from VOSViewer with different options such as proportional labels, heat maps, or cluster density maps. The maps can also be web-started and/or animated (e.g., using PowerPoint). The "citing" dimension of the aggregated journal-journal citation matrix was found to provide a more comprehensive description than the matrix based on the cited archive. The relations between local and global maps and their different functions in studying the sciences in terms of journal lit
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 Citation Reports database, in which the nodes were journals and edges were established based on citations among journals. The overall network for the 11-year period (1999-2009) studied was small-world and scale free with regard to the in-strength. Upon visualizing the network topology an overall structure of the various science fields could be inferred, especially their interconnections. We confirmed quantitatively that science fields are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, with the degree of interdisplinarity (i.e. entropy) correlating strongly with the in-strength of journals and with t
Publication patterns of 79 forest scientists awarded major international forestry prizes during 1990-2010 were compared with the journal classification and ranking promoted as part of the 'Excellence in Research for Australia' (ERA) by the Australian Research Council. The data revealed that these scientists exhibited an elite publication performance during the decade before and two decades following their first major award. An analysis of their 1703 articles in 431 journals revealed substantial differences between the journal choices of these elite scientists and the ERA classification and ranking of journals. Implications from these findings are that additional cross-classifications should be added for many journals, and there should be an adjustment to the ranking of several journals relevant to the ERA Field of Research classified as 0705 Forestry Sciences.
A number of journal classification systems have been developed in bibliometrics since the launch of the Citation Indices by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) in the 1960s. These systems are used to normalize citation counts with respect to field-specific citation patterns. The best known system is the so-called "Web-of-Science Subject Categories" (WCs). In other systems papers are classified by algorithmic solutions. Using the Journal Citation Reports 2014 of the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index (n of journals = 11,149), we examine options for developing a new system based on journal classifications into subject categories using aggregated journal-journal citation data. Combining routines in VOSviewer and Pajek, a tree-like classification is developed. At each level one can generate a map of science for all the journals subsumed under a category. Nine major fields are distinguished at the top level. Further decomposition of the social sciences is pursued for the sake of example with a focus on journals in information science (LIS) and science studies (STS). The new classification system improves on alternative options by avoiding the problem
Rankings of scholarly journals based on citation data are often met with skepticism by the scientific community. Part of the skepticism is due to disparity between the common perception of journals' prestige and their ranking based on citation counts. A more serious concern is the inappropriate use of journal rankings to evaluate the scientific influence of authors. This paper focuses on analysis of the table of cross-citations among a selection of Statistics journals. Data are collected from the Web of Science database published by Thomson Reuters. Our results suggest that modelling the exchange of citations between journals is useful to highlight the most prestigious journals, but also that journal citation data are characterized by considerable heterogeneity, which needs to be properly summarized. Inferential conclusions require care in order to avoid potential over-interpretation of insignificant differences between journal ratings. Comparison with published ratings of institutions from the UK's Research Assessment Exercise shows strong correlation at aggregate level between assessed research quality and journal citation `export scores' within the discipline of Statistics.
Using the Scopus dataset (1996-2007) a grand matrix of aggregated journal-journal citations was constructed. This matrix can be compared in terms of the network structures with the matrix contained in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) of the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI). Since the Scopus database contains a larger number of journals and covers also the humanities, one would expect richer maps. However, the matrix is in this case sparser than in the case of the ISI data. This is due to (i) the larger number of journals covered by Scopus and (ii) the historical record of citations older than ten years contained in the ISI database. When the data is highly structured, as in the case of large journals, the maps are comparable, although one may have to vary a threshold (because of the differences in densities). In the case of interdisciplinary journals and journals in the social sciences and humanities, the new database does not add a lot to what is possible with the ISI databases.
Using Scopus data, we construct a global map of science based on aggregated journal-journal citations from 1996-2012 (N of journals = 20,554). This base map enables users to overlay downloads from Scopus interactively. Using a single year (e.g., 2012), results can be compared with mappings based on the Journal Citation Reports at the Web-of-Science (N = 10,936). The Scopus maps are more detailed at both the local and global levels because of their greater coverage, including, for example, the arts and humanities. The base maps can be interactively overlaid with journal distributions in sets downloaded from Scopus, for example, for the purpose of portfolio analysis. Rao-Stirling diversity can be used as a measure of interdisciplinarity in the sets under study. Maps at the global and the local level, however, can be very different because of the different levels of aggregation involved. Two journals, for example, can both belong to the humanities in the global map, but participate in different specialty structures locally. The base map and interactive tools are available online (with instructions) at http://www.leydesdorff.net/scopus_ovl.
The journal impact factor (JIF) is the average of the number of citations of the papers published in a journal, calculated according to a specific formula; it is extensively used for the evaluation of research and researchers. The method assumes that all papers in a journal have the same scientific merit, which is measured by the JIF of the publishing journal. This implies that the number of citations measures scientific merits but the JIF does not evaluate each individual paper by its own number of citations. Therefore, in the comparative evaluation of two papers, the use of the JIF implies a risk of failure, which occurs when a paper in the journal with the lower JIF is compared to another with fewer citations in the journal with the higher JIF. To quantify this risk of failure, this study calculates the failure probabilities, taking advantage of the lognormal distribution of citations. In two journals whose JIFs are ten-fold different, the failure probability is low. However, in most cases when two papers are compared, the JIFs of the journals are not so different. Then, the failure probability can be close to 0.5, which is equivalent to evaluating by coin flipping.
The aggregated journal-journal citation matrix derived from the Journal Citation Reports 2001 can be decomposed into a unique subject classification by using the graph-analytical algorithm of bi-connected components. This technique was recently incorporated in software tools for social network analysis. The matrix can be assessed in terms of its decomposability using articulation points which indicate overlap between the components. The articulation points of this set did not exhibit a next-order network of 'general science' journals. However, the clusters differ in size and in terms of the internal density of their relations. A full classification of the journals is provided in an Appendix. The clusters can also be extracted and mapped for the visualization.
International collaboration is sometimes encouraged in the belief that it generates higher quality research or is more capable of addressing societal problems. Nevertheless, while there is evidence that the journal articles of international teams tend to be more cited than average, perhaps from increased international audiences, there is no science-wide direct academic evidence of a connection between international collaboration and research quality. This article empirically investigates the connection between international collaboration and research quality for the first time, with 148,977 UK-based journal articles with post publication expert review scores from the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF). Using an ordinal regression model controlling for collaboration, international partners increased the odds of higher quality scores in 27 out of 34 Units of Assessment (UoAs) and all Main Panels. The results therefore give the first large scale evidence of the fields in which international co-authorship for articles is usually apparently beneficial. At the country level, the results suggests that UK collaboration with other high research-expenditure economies generates higher q