The Financial Times 50 (FT50) journal list shapes hiring, promotion, accreditation, and research evaluation across business schools worldwide. Yet journals on the list are typically treated as if they represent a homogeneous tier of excellence. We test this assumption by comparing 53 FT50 and recently removed journals across three distinct impact channels: scholarly influence (field-weighted citations and visibility), policy uptake, and technological reach through patent citations. Using a panel of more than 60,000 publications from 2005 to 2019, we find striking heterogeneity hidden beneath the binary FT50 label. Elite economics journals dominate policy influence, information systems and marketing journals lead technological impact, while many highly cited management journals exhibit limited reach beyond academia. Citation, policy, and patent indicators behave as largely independent dimensions of impact, with a citation-only ranking correlating only moderately with a multidimensional ranking. Nearly half of all journals change quartile once policy and patent indicators are incorporated, demonstrating that assessments based solely on scholarly citations overlook important dimension
In the field of scientometrics, the subject classification system of academic journals holds great importance. Accurate identification and classification of "multidisciplinary" journals are crucial in revealing the scientific structure and evaluating journals. Based on data from the Web of Science database from 2016 to 2020, we calculated the disciplinary diversity of journals using the paper-level subject classification system, then conducted a systematic analysis of JCR multidisciplinary journals. Studies showed that most multidisciplinary journals have high disciplinary diversity, while non-multidisciplinary journals tend to have relatively lower diversity. Some multidisciplinary journals with low disciplinary diversities may misclassify disciplines. In addition, there are inconsistencies in the diversity of journal disciplines at different granularities. Our study also visually analyzed the four types of diversity distribution tendencies of multidisciplinary journals. Moreover, ten potential multidisciplinary journals were found in non-multidisciplinary categories.
We calculate the 2024 impact factors for the 38 most widely used journals in Astrophysics, using the citations collated by NASA/ADS (Astrophysics Data System) and compare them to the official impact factors. This includes journals which publish papers outside of astrophysics such as PRD, EPJC, Nature, etc. We also propose a new metric to gauge the impact factor based on the median number of citations in a journal and calculate the same for all the journals. We find that the ADS-based impact factors are mostly in agreement, albeit higher than the official impact factors for most journals. The journals with the maximum fractional difference in median-based and old impact factors are JHEAP and PTEP. We find the maximum difference between the ADS and official impact factor for Nature.
Probably Not. Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) was introduced to address the limitations of traditional metrics like the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), particularly its inability to normalize citation impact across different disciplines. This study reveals that JCI faces significant challenges in field normalization for Art & Humanities journals, as evidenced by much lower correlations with a more granular, paper-level metric, CNCI-CT. A detailed analysis of Architecture journals highlights how journal-level misclassification and the interdisciplinary nature of content exacerbate these issues, leading to less reliable evaluations. We recommend improving journal classification systems or adopting paper-level normalization methods, potentially supported by advanced AI techniques, to enhance the accuracy and effectiveness of JCI for Art & Humanities disciplines.
A key feature of questionable journals is a lack of adequate peer review of their articles. Content of thus unknown quality may be utilised by unsuspecting practitioners or incorporated into peer-reviewed research, becoming legitimised. It is therefore necessary to examine the citation patterns of articles in questionable journals to understand the impact and reach of research in questionable journals. Similar research has tended to focus on authors from low- and middle-income countries. As such, this study investigates the profile and impact of research in questionable journals by authors in Germany. Questionable journals were identified by matching journals with articles by authors at German institutions from Dimensions to Cabell's Predatory Reports. Metadata for these articles and a comparative sample of articles in non-questionable journals were extracted from Dimensions and the 3 year citations, self-citations, uncited rate, profile of co-authoring and citing countries, and institution type of authors were compared between groups. Nearly 600 articles in 88 questionable journals were published by German authors in 2010-2020. Three-quarters were in the medical and health science
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
In this paper, we examine the evolution of the impact of non-elite journals. We attempt to answer two questions. First, what fraction of the top-cited articles are published in non-elite journals and how has this changed over time. Second, what fraction of the total citations are to non-elite journals and how has this changed over time. We studied citations to articles published in 1995-2013. We computed the 10 most-cited journals and the 1000 most-cited articles each year for all 261 subject categories in Scholar Metrics. We marked the 10 most-cited journals in a category as the elite journals for the category and the rest as non-elite. There are two conclusions from our study. First, the fraction of top-cited articles published in non-elite journals increased steadily over 1995-2013. While the elite journals still publish a substantial fraction of high-impact articles, many more authors of well-regarded papers in diverse research fields are choosing other venues. The number of top-1000 papers published in non-elite journals for the representative subject category went from 149 in 1995 to 245 in 2013, a growth of 64%. Looking at broad research areas, 4 out of 9 areas saw at least
Previous work indicates that over the past 20 years, the highest quality work have been published in an increasingly diverse and larger group of journals. In this paper we examine whether this diversification has also affected the handful of elite journals that are traditionally considered to be the best. We examine citation patterns over the past 40 years of 7 long-standing traditionally elite journals and 6 journals that have been increasing in importance over the past 20 years. To be among the top 5% or 1% cited papers, papers now need about twice as many citations as they did 40 years ago. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s elite journals have been publishing a decreasing proportion of these top cited papers. This also applies to the two journals that are typically considered as the top venues and often used as bibliometric indicators of "excellence", Science and Nature. On the other hand, several new and established journals are publishing an increasing proportion of most cited papers. These changes bring new challenges and opportunities for all parties. Journals can enact policies to increase or maintain their relative position in the journal hierarchy. Researchers now have
Predatory journals are Open Access journals of highly questionable scientific quality. Such journals pretend to use peer review for quality assurance, and spam academics with requests for submissions, in order to collect author payments. In recent years predatory journals have received a lot of negative media. While much has been said about the harm that such journals cause to academic publishing in general, an overlooked aspect is how much articles in such journals are actually read and in particular cited, that is if they have any significant impact on the research in their fields. Other studies have already demonstrated that only some of the articles in predatory journals contain faulty and directly harmful results, while a lot of the articles present mediocre and poorly reported studies. We studied citation statistics over a five-year period in Google Scholar for 250 random articles published in such journals in 2014, and found an average of 2,6 citations per article and that 60 % of the articles had no citations at all. For comparison a random sample of articles published in the approximately 25,000 peer reviewed journals included in the Scopus index had an average of 18,1 cit
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 these articles revealed that 828 of them cite unreliable articles from hijacked journals. During 01.Jan.2021-31.Jan.2022, an average of 2 citejacked articles has been published daily in established journals. Given the limited number of titles included in this study, the phenomenon might be wider and is not yet systematically studied.
This paper investigates the Twitter interaction patterns of journals from the Science Citation Index (SCI) of Master Journal List (MJL). A total of 953,253 tweets extracted from 857 journal accounts, were analyzed in this study. Findings indicate that SCI journals interacted more with each other but much less with journals from other citation indices. The network structure of the communication graph resembled a tight crowd network, with Nature journals playing a major part. Information sources such as news portals and scientific organizations were mentioned more in tweets, than academic journal Twitter accounts. Journals with high journal impact factors (JIFs) were found to be prominent hubs in the communication graph. Differences were found between the Twitter usage of SCI journals with Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) journals.
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 2015. The relevance of EDFs clustering is discussed. Our findings reveal four-cluster space of physics journals. The space brings to light the essential distinctions between physics journals and shows different level of influence of scientific publishers belonging to different types (professional physics societies, transnational and local publishers). The study of EDFs grouped by publishers reveals two binary oppositions that structure relations between them: "global\,--- local" publishers and "high cited\,--- low cited" publishers.
Articles in high-impact journals are, on average, more frequently cited. But are they cited more often because those articles are somehow more "citable"? Or are they cited more often simply because they are published in a high-impact journal? Although some evidence suggests the latter, the causal relationship is not clear. We here compare citations of preprints to citations of the published version to uncover the causal mechanism. We build on an earlier model of citation dynamics to infer the causal effect of journals on citations. We find that high-impact journals select articles that tend to attract more citations. At the same time, we find that high-impact journals augment the citation rate of published articles. Our results yield a deeper understanding of the role of journals in the research system. The use of journal metrics in research evaluation has been increasingly criticized in recent years and article-level citations are sometimes suggested as an alternative. Our results show that removing impact factors from evaluation does not negate the influence of journals. This insight has important implications for changing practices of research evaluation.
The possibilities of using the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) for journal mapping have not been sufficiently recognized because of the absence of a Journal Citations Report (JCR) for this database. A quasi-JCR for the A&HCI (2008) was constructed from the data contained in the Web-of-Science and is used for the evaluation of two journals as examples: Leonardo and Art Journal. The maps on the basis of the aggregated journal-journal citations within this domain can be compared with maps including references to journals in the Science Citation Index and Social Science Citation Index. Art journals are cited by (social) science journals more than by other art journals, but these journals draw upon one another in terms of their own references. This cultural impact in terms of being cited is not found when documents with a topic such as "digital humanities" are analyzed. This community of practice functions more as an intellectual organizer than a journal.
Science depends on a communication system, and today that is largely provided by digital technologies such as the internet and web. Despite that digital technologies provide the infrastructure for that communication system, peer-reviewed journals continue to mimic workflows and processes from the print era. This paper focuses on one artifact from the print era, the journal issue, and describes how this artifact has been detrimental to the communication of science and therefore to science itself. To replace the journal issue, this paper argues that scholarly publishing and journals could more fully embrace digital technologies by creating digital libraries to present and organize scholarly output.
This study describes a method to detect hijacked journals based on the analysis of the archives of clone journals. This approach is most effective in discovering a network of hijacked journals that have the same organizer(s). Analysis of the archives of clone journals allowed to detect 62 URLs of hijacked journals. It also provided the possibility to predict two clone websites before they became operational. This study shows that most detected hijacked journals represent a network of clone journals organized by one or several fraudulent individuals. The information and content of nine legitimate journals were compromised in international and national scientometric databases.
As most electronic journals available today have been derived from print originals, print journals have become a vital element in the broad development of electronic journals publishing. Further dependence on the print publishing model, however, will be a constraint on the continuing development of e-journals, and a series of conflicts are likely to arise. Making the most of e-journals requires that a distinctive new publishing model is developed. We consider some of the issues that will be fundamental in this new model, starting with user motivations and some reported publisher experiences, both of which suggest a broadening desire for comprehensive linked archives. This leads in turn to questions about the impact of rights assignment by authors, in particular the common practice of giving exlusive rights to publishers for individual works. Some non-prescriptive solutions are suggested, and four steps towards optimum e-journals are proposed.
The study of how science is discussed and how scholarly actors interact on social media has increasingly become popular in the field of scientometrics in recent years. While most prior studies focused on research outputs discussed on global platforms, such as Twitter or Facebook, the presence of scholarly journals on local platforms was seldom studied, especially in the Chinese social media context. To fill this gap, this study investigates the uptake of WeChat (a Chinese social network app) by the Chinese scholarly journals indexed by the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI). The results show that 65.3% of CSSCI-indexed journals have created WeChat public accounts and posted over 193 thousand WeChat posts in total. At the journal level, bibliometric indicators (e.g., citations, downloads, and journal impact factors) and WeChat indicators (e.g., clicks, likes, replies, and recommendations) are weakly correlated with each other, reinforcing the idea of fundamentally differentiated dimensions of indicators between bibliometrics and social media metrics. Results also show that journals with WeChat public accounts slightly outperform those without WeChat public accounts in te
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 also found that the difference of subfields visibility in the same journal can be even higher than the difference of visibility between different journals. Our results show that subfields impact is an important factor accounting for journals visibility.
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 also quality of citing journals. Correlation coefficients among different indicators for journal evaluation: impact factors by Thomson Scientific, weighted impact factors offered by different researchers, average and medians of all citing journals impact factors and 5-year impact factors were analysed.