Reputation and bibliometric approaches to identifying the most influential journals to which a scholar should submit his or her research for maximum impact and influence.

1. Elaine M. Lasda Bergman
Bibliographer for Social Welfare,
Gerontology and Dewey Reference
elasdabergman@albany.edu
March 29, 2012

2. Introduction
• Many factors go into choosing journal
• Relevance
• Prestige
• Who will accept my article?
• Visibility

3. Identifying Key Journals in the
field
• Two basic approaches:
– Reputation approach
– Bibliometric approach

4. REPUTATION APPROACH

5. Reputation approach
• Perceived quality of journals by scholars within
field
• Evaluative
• Editorial board composition
• Where journal is indexed (which databases)

6. Where to find this type of ranking
• Journal articles : surveys, polls, etc. assessing
expert opinion/recognition/value of journals in
field
• Subject database searches
• Anecdotal info from mentors, colleagues, peers
• Journal website (for editorial board)
• Ulrich’s (for database indexing)
• ASK YOUR SUBJECT BIBLIOGRAPHER

7. Why use Reputation approach?
• “Name Brand”
– publish in a well known journal implies visibility
• Interdisciplinary fields or narrow subfields
– Bibliometric measurements may not adequately
reflect influence, prestige of journals that fall outside
of traditional disciplinary lines
• Can be a mark of “quality” as opposed to
influence, prestige, other bibliometric indicators
• Can be more important than bibliometrics

8. Disadvantages to reputation
approaches
• Difficult to quantify if no published studies, or
the studies are dated
• In a small subspecialty, the broader group of
academics in your discipline many not know your
journal
• Emerging fields may not have journals with any
sort of reputation
• Subjective nature of expert opinion

9. BIBLIOMETRIC APPROACH

10. What is bibliometrics?
• Scholarly communication: tracing the history and
evolution of ideas from one scholar to another
• Measures the scholarly influence of articles,
journals, scholars

11. The birth of citation analysis
• Eugene Garfield: “father of citation analysis”
developed the first bibliometric index tools
• Citation indexes and Journal Citation Reports
– “ISI Indexes”: Science Citation Index, Social Science
Citation Index, Arts and Humanities Index
• Better coverage on hard sciences than on social
sciences and worse still on humanities

12. Garfield’s metrics
• Citation count
• Impact Factor
• Immediacy Index
• Citation Half-Life

13. Citation count
• Number of times cited within a given time period
– Author
– Journal
• Does not take into account
– Materials not included in citation database
– Self citations

14. Impact factor
• Measures “impact” of a journal (not an article)
within a given subject
• Formula is a ratio:
– Number of citations to a journal in a given year from
articles occurring in the past 2 years Divided by the
number of scholarly articles published in the journal
in the past 2 years

15. Concerns with Impact Factor
• Cannot be used to compare cross disciplinary
(per Garfield himself) due to different rates of
publication and citation
• Two year time frame not adequate for non-scientific
disciplines
• Coverage of some disciplines not sufficient in the
ISI databases
• Is a measure of “impact” a measure of “quality”?

16. Immediacy index
• What it’s supposed to measure: how quickly
articles in a given journal have an impact on the
discipline
• Formula: the average number of times an article
in a journal in a given year was cited in that same
year

17. Citation Half-Life
• What it’s supposed to measure: duration of
relevance of articles in a given journal
• Formula: median age of articles cited for a
particular journal in a given year

18. TWENTY FIRST CENTURY TOOLS

19. Influence of Google Page Rank
• Eigenvector analysis:
– “The probability that a researcher, in documenting his or her
research, goes from a journal to another selecting a random
reference in a research article of the first journal. Values
obtained after the whole process represent a ‘random
research walk’ that starts from a random journal to end in
another after following an infinite process of selecting random
references in research articles. A random jump factor is added
to represent the probability that the researcher chooses a
journal by means other than following the references of
research articles.” (Gonzales-Pereira, et.al., 2010)

20. Sources Using ISI Data

21. Eigenfactor.org
http://libguides.library.albany.edu/content.php?pid=60086&sid=441804
• Uses ISI data
• Similar to PageRank
• Listed in JCR as of 2009
• Eigenfactor Score :
– Influence of the citing journal divided by the total number of
citations appearing in that journal
• Example: Neurology (2006): score of .204 = an estimated 0.2% of
all citation traffic of journals in JCR (Bergstrom & West, 2008).
• Larger journals will have more citations and therefore will have
larger eigenfactors

22. Article Influence Score
• From Eigenfactor: measure of prestige of a journal
• Average influence, per article of the papers on a journal
• Comparable to the Impact Factor
• Corrects for the issues of journal size in the raw
Eigenfactor score
• Neurology’s 2006 article influence score = 2.01. Or that
an avg. article in Neurology is 2X as influential as an avg.
article in all of JCR

23. Journal Citation Reports
(JCRWeb)
• Library website ->Databases->Search by Name ->J
• http://library.albany.edu

24. Scopus
Google Scholar
NEW SOURCES FOR CITATION
INFORMATION

25. Scopus:
alternate database of citation data
• Review panel, i.e., quality control
• Bigger field than ISI: covers all the journals in
WoS and more
• Strongest in “hard” sciences, ostensibly improved
social science coverage, arts and humanities: are
“getting there”
• Algorithmically determined with human editing

26. Scopus analytics
• SJR/SCIMago
• SNIP
• Citation Count
• Document count
• % Not Cited
• % Review Articles (not original research)

27. SNIP
(Source Normalized Impact Per Paper)
• Journal Ranking based on citation analysis with
adjustments for the frequency of citations of the
other journals within the field (the field is all
journals citing this particular journal)
• SNIP is defined as the ratio of the journal’s
citation count per paper and the citation
potential in its subject field. (Moed, 2009)

28. SJR:SCImago Journal Rank
• What it’s supposed to measure: “current
“average prestige per paper”
• SCImago website uses journal/citation data from
Scopus, and is also available from Scopus
• Formula: citation time window is 3 years instead
of 2 like JIF
• Corrections for self citations
• Strong correlation to JIF

29. SCImago Journal Rank
• Prestige factors include: number of journals in
db, number of papers from journal in database,
citation numbers and “importance” received
from other journals: size dependent: larger
journals have greater prestige values
• Normalized by the number of significant works
published by the journal: helps correct for size
variations
• Corrections made for journal self citations

30. Scopus
• Library website->databases->search by name->S
• http://library.albany.edu

31. Google Scholar
alternate database of citation data
• No rhyme or reason to what is included
• Biggest source of citation data
• Foreign language sources
• Sources other than scholarly journals
• Entirely algorithmically determined, no human
editing
• AVAILABLE METRICS NOT GOOD FOR JOURNAL
RANKING

32. Google Scholar
• Publish or Perish
• CIDS

33. Publish or Perish
• Provides a variety of metrics for measuring scholarly
impact and output.
• More useful for metrics on authors than journals or
institutions
• Uses Google Scholar citation information
• Useful for interdisciplinary topics, fields relying heavily
on conference papers or reports, non-English language
sources, new journals, etc.
• Continuously updated since 2006

34. Publish or Perish Metrics
• Basic metrics:
– # papers, #citations, active years, years since first
published, average #of citations per paper, average #
of citations per year, average # citations per author,
etc.
• Complex metrics
– H index (and its many variations, mquotient, g-index
(corrects h-index for variations in citation patterns),
AR index, AW index
• Does not have any corrections for SELF CITATIONS

35. CIDS
• Measures output of authors for prestige and
influence
• Similar to PoP
• Corrects for Self-Citations

36. CIDS metrics
• Citations per year, h-index, g-index, total
citations, average cites per paper, self citations
included and excluded, etc.

37. Why use Bibliometric approach
• Considered empirical evidence of journal use
• Means of tracing the evolution of scholarship in a
topic/discipline

38. Disadvantages to Bibliometric
approach
• Prestigious, but small journals in a subspecialty may
not rank as highly in JCR and other metrics as
general publications
• “impact” vs. “quality”
• Editors tend to publish articles which cite their own
journal – increase self citation and their own ranking
• There are many reasons to cite a work, not all of
them good!

39. OTHER METRICS

40. Other Metrics
• Journal Acceptance Rates
– Cabell’s Directory of Publishing Opportunities
• Various disciplines
– Journal website (sometimes)
– Information from professional associations
– ASK YOUR SUBJECT BIBLIOGRAPHER

41. Other Metrics
• Ulrichsweb
– Comprehensive directory of published journals and
periodical literature
– Circulation stats, referee status, publisher, frequency
of publication, etc.
Library website->databases->search by name-> U
http://library.albany.edu

42. Other Metrics: The Future?
• Online “Clicks” or downloads
• MESUR

43. What does it all mean for
Tenure and Promotion?
• Choosing the right journal is a balancing act
• No one bibliometric indicator is the final word on
journal “quality”
• Reputation and bibliometrics in tandem can
paint a positive picture of your journal choice
• Bibliometrics can also be applied to an individual
scholar’s work

44. Final thought:
• The ranking or prestige of a journal is *not
necessarily* an indicator of the quality of an
individual article published in it.
• To judge the quality of an individual article, READ
THE ARTICLE

45. QUESTIONS?
Elaine M. Lasda Bergman
Social Welfare, Gerontology and Dewey Reference Bibliographer
Dewey Graduate Library
elasdabergman@albany.edu
442-3695