Journal Impact Factor

Increasingly, academics have to demonstrate that their research has academic impact. Universities normally use journal rankings and journal impact factors to assess the research impact of individual academics. More recently, citation counts for individual articles and the h-index have also been used to measure the academic impact of academics. There are, however, several serious problems with relying on journal rankings, journal impact factors and citation counts. For example, articles without any impact may be published in highly ranked journals or journals with high impact factor, whereas articles with high impact could be published in lower ranked journals or journals with low impact factor. Citation counts can also be easily gamed and manipulated and the h-index disadvantages early career academics. This paper discusses these and several other problems and suggests alternatives such as post-publication peer review and open-access journals.

This research was funded by, and implemented within, a UK national research organisation, while the author was the KE and Impact Evaluation Manager responsible for assessing impact on a £15m UK government-funded research programme.

This work was also submitted as the authors MBA dissertation which was accepted and awarded in 2009.

ABSTRACT: A methodology and methods ‘toolbox’ is proposed for conducting impact research and assessment from within research programmes. The emphasis is upon how to clarify and assess the wider impacts from the early stages onwards.

The approach explicitly acknowledges, and attempts to address, the known issues and challenges of impact assessment while drawing upon the resources and opportunities available to research managers and researchers within such programmes.

The study has two triangulating foundations. Firstly, it examines the academic literature to help identify and design the pilot methodology and methods. Secondly it trials these in a real programme to both test and improve them.

The study was conducted over one year within one leading UK research organisation, where two research programmes (and around 60 research projects of £15m total value) were being assessed for their impacts. The study draws upon actual impact management experience and reflection, prospective (ex ante) and retrospective (ex post) assessments, participatory contributions from leading researchers undergoing assessment, and consultation with external users. The findings of this study outline the pilot and its first iteration. Recommendations are made for improvement to the methodology and methods.

A subsequent follow-on bid to UK government incorporating the impacts identified from implementing this methodology, successfully led to a further £15m of government funding.

It is expected the pilot methodology and methods will be applicable to other organisations, conducting and funding such research programmes, required to research and assess the wider research impacts.

Although primary focus of implemetation trials was upon research in physical sciences, technology, high-tech engineering, computing/IT, and environment, the wider literature study, the methodology design and justification, the methods proposed and used, and the resulting general recommendations and lessons are expected to apply more broadly to many other research areas, where the impact is to be found more widely in the society, economy, government or public sector or within organizations, policies, professions or the public.

Interest in this work is expected from research programme managers, impact managers and assessors, management consultants advising in this area, and government funding managers, all seeking to embed a developing approach to understand, capture, and enhance wider impact.

This Impact Report identifies and summarises the diverse impacts, resulting from the £500m of UK funding of Science and Technology in 2013, using numerous quantitative metrics and short case study extracts.  It shows how the varied impacts of a national science and technology organization and its many funded programmes can be annually identified, captured, tracked, and summarised in a public document.

The report was produced for, and by, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) -  the UK Research Council responsible for funding: (1) all UK astronomy, particle and nuclear physics research, (2) related UK science and technology facilities (e.g. as Harwell and Daresbury), (3) the UK contribution to international science (e.g. CERN, international telescopes and space missions), (4) innovation and business spin-off programmes, and (5) UK public engagement activities.

The Report was co-researched and co-authored by the STFC Impact Team, including myself while Impact Evaluation Manager in 2013, with Dr. Claire Dougan-McCallie (lead author/Head of Impact) and Jenny Beard, with additional input from senior managers, and many data and case study contributions from other key managers across STFC.

Varied key impacts are identified and reported including:

• Research amongst the best (by citation impact) in astronomy, nuclear and particle physics.
• Supported research of 226 Principal Investigators in 70 universities, led to 1,100 peer-reviewed papers in 2012.
• Facilities (the Diamond Light Source, ISIS and CLF) were used in 2012/13 by over 4,200 unique users , in over 2,400 experiments, producing over 1,000 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

• Technology from CERN benefited the UK economy by over £100 billion every year.
• Funding the development of the UK’s space, internet and computer animation industries, returned over £500 billion to the UK economy per annum.
• Funded Innovation Campuses hosted over 230 enterprises and supported over 5,000 jobs.
• UK industry won £43 million in contracts from the international subscriptions funded, and had accumulated a total of £150 million since 2005.

• Funded research inspired future generations to study STEM subjects, attracting 90% of UK undergraduates to study physics, funded 782 PhD students  and 16,800 student training days.
• Between 2009 to 2012 public engagement programmes engaged people on 58 million occasions, with 2 million people engaged in face-to-face activities in 2013 alone.

The bibliography in the 21st century acquires a new impuls, now as a basis for bibliometric measurements, in demand both for the evaluation of individual and institutional publications ratings, and for a comparative analysis of trends in the development of academic fields. These new realities increase the requirements for the correctness of the reference and bibliographic apparatus in nowadays conditions. The article considers the essential aspects of bibliometrics with reference to the publications of historians.

Citation based metrics are widely used to assess the impact of research published in journals. This paper presents the results of a research study to verify the accuracy of data and calculations of journal impact metrics presented in Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus in the case of three journals of information and library science. Data collected from the websites of journals were compared with that of two citation extended databases. The study manually calculated the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and the Impact per Publication (IPP) in accordance with formulas given in the databases. Data were also collected from the Google Scholar to draw a comparison. The study found discrepancies in two sets of data and bibliometric values, i.e., systematic values presented in WoS and Scopus and calculated in this study. Commercial databases presented inflated measures based on fabricated or erroneous data. The study is of practical importance to researchers, universities and research financing bodies that consider these bibliometric indicators as a good tool for measuring performance, assessment, and evaluation of research quality as well as researchers.

Journal impact factors (IFs), a measure of citation frequency, are published annually in Journal Citation Reports (JCR). Journal IFs, although controversial because of the uses to which they have been put in academic arenas, remain a metric about which nurses should be informed. This paper discusses key issues in the controversy, explains how IFs are computed, and presents historical and 2009 IF data for nursing journals. The number of nursing journals indexed in JCR has grown from 35 in 2004 to 74 in 2009. The journals currently indexed are diverse in terms of focus (practice vs research), specialty areas, and country of publication. The median IF score for nursing journals (0.91 in 2009) is similar to that for several other health care categories. Given the controversies surrounding IFs, it may be useful for nurses to play a more active role in furthering the debate by undertaking research relating to IFs, including studies of how they affect nurses' scholarly pursuits and pu...

Objectives: Although research has consistently shown a higher prevalence of depression among women compared with men, there is a lack of consensus regarding explanatory factors for these gender-related differences. The aim of this paper was to analyse the scientific quality of different gender-related explanatory models of depression in the medical database PubMed. Study design: Qualitative and quantitative analyses of PubMed articles. Methods: In a database search in PubMed for 2002, 82 articles on gender and depression were selected and analysed with qualitative and quantitative content analyses. In total, 10 explanatory factors and four explanatory models were found. The ISI Web of Science database was searched in order to obtain the citation number and journal impact factor for each article. Results: The most commonly used gender-related explanatory model for depression was the biomedical model (especially gonadal hormones), followed by the sociocultural and psychological models. Compared with the other models, the biomedical model scored highest on bibliometric measures but lowest on measures of multifactorial dimensions and differences within the group of men/women. Conclusion: The biomedical model for explaining gender-related aspects of depression had the highest quality when bibliometric methods were used. However, the sociocultural and psychological models had higher quality than the biomedical model when multifactoriality and intersectionality were analysed. There is a need for the development of new methods in order to evaluate the scientific quality of research.

This study, based on systematic review and meta-analysis, aimed to collect and analyze evidence on correlation between perception-based journal rankings and the most popular citation-based measure, Thomson Reuters Journal Impact Factor (JIF). A search was conducted in the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar databases. After the screening of titles, abstracts, and full text, 18 articles were selected as eligible for review and analysis. The included studies belonged to various subject areas in social sciences, science, and technology. The correlation coefficients found in most of the studies were statistically significant in a positive direction. The heterogeneity test was positive. Therefore, the random-effect method of meta-analysis was applied. The value of pooled correlation coefficient indicated a moderate positive relationship between two methods of assessing the quality of academic journals. The absence of a high correlation makes decision making based on a single ranking method dangerous. Therefore, a hybrid approach for journal assessment is recommended.

The aim of this study is to gain a thorough understanding of the Social Science Research System (SSRS) in Serbia.To that end, the report first outlines the basic parameters of the system by mapping its key stakeholders, analysing their relationship and different purposes of those relationships.

In this paper, we review findings from an analysis of the past decade (2001-2010) of research in 10 major journals in the field of instructional design and technology.  Each research article published in these journals during this decade was categorized according to its focus or methodology, topical keywords, authorship, and citation trends; and the findings were aggregated across all of the journals to show trends over the last decade.  We found there is a strong emphasis on technology-related issues, distance education, communication strategies, and instructional methods over cognitive-related topics and learning issues.  There is a strong history of theoretical inquiry and and a fairly even balance of qualitative and quantitative research being published, with other research methods emerging.  However, there are distinct differences in methodological stances among the journals.  We also found some evidence that the ISI Impact Factor may not be the best indicator of impact quality for journals in our field.

This theoretical reflection article carries out a critique of the political economy
of scientific measurement as exemplified in the analysis of the impact factor as
a measure of scientific quality. It explains the social and cultural mechanisms
involved in the construction of these hegemonic ways of thinking and acting,
and warns against the serious consequences of this global project for the deinstitutionalization
of local science and the emergence of an independent
national science. Said consequences are especially serious in the case of the
humanities and the social sciences.
critique of quality, impact factor; (Thesaurus) bibliometrics,
measurement, scientific information, scientific policy

African scholarly research is relatively invisible globally because even though research production on the continent is growing in absolute terms, it is falling in comparative terms. In addition, traditional metrics of visibility, such as the Impact Factor, fail to make legible all African scholarly production. Many African universities also do not take a strategic approach to scholarly communication to broaden the reach of their scholars’ work.

To address this challenge, the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) was established to help raise the visibility of African scholarship by mapping current research and communication practices in Southern African universities and by recommending and piloting technical and administrative innovations based on open access dissemination principles. To do this, SCAP conducted extensive research in four faculties at the Universities of Botswana, Cape Town, Mauritius and Namibia.

SCAP found that scholars:
• carry heavy teaching and administrative loads which hinder their research productivity
• remain unconvinced by open access dissemination
• find it easier to collaborate with scholars in the global North than in the rest of Africa
• rarely communicate their research with government
• engage in small, locally-based research projects that are either unfunded or funded by their universities
• produce outputs that are often interpretive, derivative or applied due, in part, to institutional rewards structures and funding challenges
• do not utilize social media technologies to disseminate their work or seek new collaborative opportunities.

All of these factors impact Africa’s research in/visibility at a time when scholarly communication is going through dramatic technical, legal, social and ethical changes.

“Seeking Impact and Visibility” shares the results of SCAP’s research and advocacy efforts. It not only analyses these four universities’ scholarly communication ecosystems, but illuminates the opportunities available for raising the visibility of their scholarship. It concludes with a series of recommendations that would enhance the communicative and developmental potential of African research.

This study will be of interest for scholars of African higher education, academically linked civil society organizations, educationally affiliated government personnel and university researchers and managers.

What are the statistical practices of articles published in journals with a high impact factor? Are there differences compared with articles published in journals with a somewhat lower impact factor that have adopted editorial policies to reduce the impact of limitations of Null Hypothesis Significance Testing? To investigate these questions, the current study analyzed all articles related to psychological, neuropsychological and medical issues, published in 2011 in four journals with high impact factors: Science, Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, and three journals with relatively lower impact factors: Neuropsychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology-Applied and the American Journal of Public Health. Results show that Null Hypothesis Significance Testing without any use of confidence intervals, effect size, prospective power and model estimation, is the prevalent statistical practice used in articles published in Nature, 89%, followed by articles published in Science, 42%. By contrast, in all other journals, both with high and lower impact factors, most articles report confidence intervals and/or effect size measures. We interpreted these differences as consequences of the editorial policies adopted by the journal editors, which are probably the most effective means to improve the statistical practices in journals with high or low impact factors.

In times of globalization there is an increasing use of English in the medical literature. The aim of this study was to analyze the influence of English-language articles in multi-language medical journals on their international recognition -as measured by a lower rate of self-citations and higher impact factor (IF).

Abstract — To have a better quantification of an in individual scholar’s citation contact, many measures have been developed. Due to the measures that indicate the quality of researchers and organizations, the h-index has received a huge attention. By definition H-index is a positive integer number, hence the difficulty to compare two different scientists having same H-index but different number of articles published and citations. The goal of this paper is to develop a new formula that transform H-index from integer into decimal number in order to give more accurate and clear comparison among different scientists having same H-index.

Keywords- Scientometric; citations, impact factor, H-index.

African scholarly research is relatively invisible globally because, even though research production on the continent is growing in absolute terms, it is falling in comparative terms. In addition, traditional metrics of visibility, such as the Impact Factor, fail to make legible all African scholarly production. And many African universities also do not take a strategic approach to scholarly communication to broaden the reach of their scholars’ work.

To address this challenge, the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) was established to help raise the visibility of African scholarship by mapping current research and communication practices in Southern African universities and by recommending and piloting technical and administrative innovations based on open access dissemination principles. To do this, SCAP conducted extensive research in four faculties at the Universities of Botswana, Cape Town, Mauritius and Namibia.

In the University of Cape Town’s Faculty of Commerce, SCAP found that scholars:
• remain unconvinced by open access dissemination
• find it easier to collaborate with scholars in the global North than in the rest of Africa
• rarely communicate their research with government
• tread a fine line between their quest for (academic) prestige and their quest for (social) relevance
• show little interest in producing “alternative” outputs (e.g. policy briefs, reports, etc.) that non-academic audiences would find more accessible than traditional journal articles
• seldom utilise social media technologies to disseminate their work or seek new collaborative opportunities.

All of these factors impact UCT’s research in/visibility at a time when scholarly communication is going through dramatic technical, legal, social and ethical changes.

“Scholarly Communication at the University of Cape Town” shares the results of SCAP’s research and advocacy efforts at UCT’s Faculty of Commerce. It not only analyses the faculty’s scholarly communication ecosystem, but illuminates the opportunities available for raising the visibility of its scholarship. It concludes with a series of recommendations that would enhance the communicative and developmental potential of the university’s research as a whole.

This study will be of interest for scholars of African higher education, academically linked civil society organisations, educationally affiliated government personnel and university researchers and managers.

Worldwide, the publishing industry has been compelled to change with digital media technology, and some traditional academic journals are struggling to adapt. This article examines the marketing and publicity actions available to the Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique and similar flagship journals in an environment characterized by open access (OA) and impact factor (IF) metrics. It reviews the opportunities and threats presented by a movement towards publishing in ungated forums and pressure in the academic community to prioritize bibliometrics. It then looks at the experience, characteristics and comparative position of the Journal/Revue before reporting on perceptions and recommendations drawn from depth interviews with journal editors, presidents of the Canadian Political Science Association, and a university librarian, which are supplemented by suggestions from editorial board members. It concludes with proposals to address these circumstances head on, many of which are generalizable to other journals wrestling with marketing and publishing in the digital age.

""""An amazing way for busy academics to publish regularly in journals using web 3.0 tools.

To be released in September, this eBook presents a simple but comprehensive model, so that you rest assured that you have done everything possible to make an impact with your research, in an attempt to generalize what successful academics seem to be doing and others do not.""""

Earlier publications have shown that the number of references as well as the number of received citations are field-dependent. Consequently, a long reference list may lead to more citations. The purpose of this article is to study the concrete relationship between number of references and citation counts. This article tries to find an answer for the concrete case of Malaysian highly cited papers and Malaysian review papers. Malaysian paper is a paper with at least one Malaysian affiliation. A total of 2466 papers consisting of two sets, namely 1966 review papers and 500 highly-cited articles, are studied. The statistical analysis shows that an increase in the number of references leads to a slight increase in the number of citations. Yet, this increase is not statistically significant. Therefore, a researcher should not try to increase the number of received citations by artificially increasing the number of references.

Introduction: In the current study, we compared h5-index provided by Google Scholar (GS), impact factor (IF) provided by web of sciences (WOS), and SCImago journal rank indicator (SJR) provided by SCOPUS for quality assessment of nuclear medicine journals.
Methods: 2013 h5-index, 2012 IF, and 2011 SJR of nuclear medicine journals were extracted from their publishers namely GS, WOS, and SCOPUS. Rank of each journal according to each index was provided. Spearman correlation was used for evaluation of the correlation between metrics.
Results: Overall 22 journals were identified. Spearman correlation coefficients between h5-index and other journal metrics were 0.907 for 2012 IF, 0.979 for 2011 JCR, and 0.978 for 2011 SCOPUS h-index (all p-values<0.00001). Wilcoxon signed ranks test showed no statistically meaningful difference between rankings according to h5-index and other journal metrics (p values of 0.589, 0.565, and 0.542 for 2012 IF, 2011 SJR, and 2011 SCOPUS h-index respectively).

Conclusion: The new GS journal metrics are reliable tools for quality assessment of the nuclear medicine journals. In our opinion, h5-index, IF, and SJR should be used in a combination as their combination would give a more holistic view of journal quality. Development of new journal metrics in addition to SJR and IF by GS should be welcomed by the scientific community.

African scholarly research is relatively invisible globally because, even though research production on the continent is growing in absolute terms, it is falling in comparative terms. In addition, traditional metrics of visibility, such as the Impact Factor, fail to make legible all African scholarly production. And many African universities also do not take a strategic approach to scholarly communication to broaden the reach of their scholars’ work.

To address this challenge, the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) was established to help raise the visibility of African scholarship by mapping current research and communication practices in Southern African universities and by recommending and piloting technical and administrative innovations based on open access dissemination principles. To do this, SCAP conducted extensive research in four faculties at the Universities of Botswana, Cape Town, Mauritius and Namibia.

In the University of Namibia’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, SCAP found that scholars:
• carry heavy teaching and administrative loads which hinder their research productivity
• remain unconvinced by open access dissemination
• find it easier to collaborate with scholars in the global North than in the rest of Africa
• rarely communicate their research with government
• engage in small, locally-based research projects that are either unfunded or funded by the university
• produce outputs that are often interpretive, derivative or applied due, in part, to institutional rewards structures and funding challenges
• do not utilise social media technologies to disseminate their work or seek new collaborative opportunities.

All of these factors impact UNAM’s research in/visibility at a time when scholarly communication is going through dramatic technical, legal, social and ethical changes.

“Scholarly Communication at the University of Namibia” shares the results of SCAP’s research and advocacy efforts at UNAM’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. It not only analyses the faculty’s scholarly communication ecosystem, but illuminates the opportunities available for raising the visibility of its scholarship. It concludes with a series of recommendations that would enhance the communicative and developmental potential of the university’s research as a whole.

This study will be of interest for scholars of African higher education, academically linked civil society organisations, educationally affiliated government personnel and university researchers and managers.

"African scholarly research is relatively invisible globally because, even though research production on the continent is growing in absolute terms, it is falling in comparative terms. In addition, traditional metrics of visibility, such as the Impact Factor, fail to make legible all African scholarly production. And many African universities also do not take a strategic approach to scholarly communication to broaden the reach of their scholars’ work.

To address this challenge, the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) was established to help raise the visibility of African scholarship by mapping current research and communication practices in Southern African universities and by recommending and piloting technical and administrative innovations based on open access dissemination principles. To do this, SCAP conducted extensive research in four faculties at the Universities of Botswana, Cape Town, Mauritius and Namibia.

In the University of Botswana’s Faculty of Humanities, SCAP found that scholars:
• carry heavy teaching and administrative loads which hinder their research productivity
• remain unconvinced by open access dissemination
• find it easier to collaborate with scholars in the global North than in the rest of Africa
• rarely communicate their research with government
• engage in small, locally-based research projects that are either unfunded or funded by the university
• produce outputs that are often interpretive, derivative or applied due, in part, to institutional rewards structures and funding challenges
• do not utilize social media technologies to disseminate their work or seek new collaborative opportunities.

All of these factors impact UB’s research in/visibility at a time when scholarly communication is going through dramatic technical, legal, social and ethical changes.

“Scholarly Communication at the University of Botswana” shares the results of SCAP’s research and advocacy efforts at UB’s Faculty of Humanities. It not only analyses the faculty’s scholarly communication ecosystem, but illuminates the opportunities available for raising the visibility of its scholarship. It concludes with a series of recommendations that would enhance the communicative and developmental potential of the university’s research as a whole.

This study will be of interest for scholars of African higher education, academically linked civil society organizations, educationally affiliated government personnel and university researchers and managers."

A review of Garfield's journal impact factor and its specific implementation as the Thomson Reuters Impact Factor reveals several weaknesses in this commonly-used indicator of journal standing. Key limitations include the mismatch between citing and cited documents, the deceptive display of three decimals that belies the real precision, and the absence of confidence intervals. These are minor issues that are easily amended and should be corrected, but more substantive improvements are needed.

This article researches the influence of IJEEE on electrical engineering and electrical engineering education as a discipline. For this purpose, the history of this journal has been presented from a citation perspective. To identify leading and evolving research areas within IJEEE the authors conducted keyword analysis, which additionally showed how IJEEE contains both educational and technical contributions. The authors also studied the temporal evolution and distribution of keywords. Word co-occurrence was analysed to discover the main context in which the keywords have been used. The analysis also revealed the prominent contributors within the community of IJEEE based on various authorship and citation criteria. It was observed that the influential authors appear in multiple ways, i.e. most of the authors who were influential by one criterion also made to the top list of other criteria. The authors concluded that the single-author pattern is quite prominent within this community, and very little work has been done between the same co-authors. Therefore, there is a need to encourage IJEEE authors to write more collaborative publications so that the authorship/co-authorship network may grow.

Objective. This paper investigated the possibility of SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator as an alternative to the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in the field of dentistry. Method. The SJR and JIF scores and ranking order of 88 dental journals were downloaded from the relevant websites. Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients were calculated to test hypotheses for association between the two journal quality metrics. Result. A very strong positive correlation was found between the scores and ranking order based on the SJR and JIF of selected journals. Hence, academics and researchers in dentistry can use the SJR indicator as an alternative to JIF.

Altmetrics sind eine Antwort auf die gewachsene Kritik am Journal Impact Faktor im Rahmen der wissenschaftlichen Leistungsmessung. Im Unterschied zu den bibliometrischen Metriken erweitern Altmetrics das Resonanzspektrum von wissenschaftlichen auf nicht-wissenschaftliche Quellen unter Rückgriff auf nutzergenerierte Daten im Social Web. Damit verbindet sich der Versuch, den gesellschaftlichen Impact von Forschung zahlenförmig abzubilden. Getragen von der Idee der Demokratisierung von Wissen, erleben Altmetrics derzeit einen Boom. Sie sind Katalysator der digitalen Wende der Wissenschaft hin zu Open Science, als deren Nebenfolge sich epistemische Kriterien zugunsten von Popularität verflüchtigen.

To investigate the science of animal welfare for zoo and wild animals in the period from 1966 to 2007, we conducted a bibliometric analysis of abstracts downloaded from The Web of Science© database using the keyword combination “Animal welfare, Zoo* and wild” in the topic field. In total we downloaded 1,125 abstracts, which were classified into the following categories: year of publication; environment of the study (e.g., zoo) or theoretical; area of knowledge (e.g., conservation in situ); number of experimental animals used; species; addresses of authors; taxonomic classification; publication language; journal name; number of citations received. Since 1990, there has been a rapid increase in the number of articles published in this area of animal welfare. One worrying result was that published articles were predominately of a theoretical nature (58.65%, N=563). Most of the articles were published by authors either in Europe (47.43%, N=480) or North America (37.65%, N=381) and written in English (87.71%, N=971). The majority of experimental studies were conducted with mammals (75.92%, N=391), and had small sample sizes (N=7 for zoo-based studies). In terms of impact factor (IF), the journals in this study had a median factor equivalent to that for the area of biological sciences (median IF=1.013). Little knowledge cross-over from farm animal welfare was found (only four articles) in this study. In conclusion, zoo and wild animal welfare as a science may benefit from a greater interaction with farm animal welfare. Zoo Biol 28:561–573, 2009. © 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

"This article analyzes the new system of indicators adopted in Italy to evaluate
universities’ research activities, and it shows that this system provides an
implicit structure of economic incentives which de facto is likely to favor the
use of English in scientific communication. This is due, among other things, to
the use of bibliometric indicators and databases skewed in favor of English.
This article also analyzes the rising phenomenon of programs taught entirely
in English in Italian universities, showing that the introduction of programs in
English does not seem to respond to a real demand by students or to a demand for language skills in the Italian labor market. Rather, it is related to the use of the number of foreign students as an indicator of university performance. The focus of the article is on the respective use of Italian and English in Italian universities, but general remarks are also relevant to other countries and the European Union as a whole. This article emphasizes the effects of academic performance indicators on linguistic diversity and thus their role as a language policy tool. In addition, it addresses the question of the quality of indicators currently employed."

I describe a simple modification which can be applied to any citation count-based index (e.g. Hirsch's h-index) quantifying a researcher's publication output. The key idea behind the proposed approach is that the merit for the citations of a paper should be distributed amongst its authors according to their relative contributions. In addition to producing inherently fairer metrics I show that the proposed modification has the potential to partially normalize for the unfair effects of honorary authorship and thus discourage this practice.

"African scholarly research is relatively invisible globally because, even though research production on the continent is growing in absolute terms, it is falling in comparative terms. In addition, traditional metrics of visibility, such as the Impact Factor, fail to make legible all African scholarly production. And many African universities also do not take a strategic approach to scholarly communication to broaden the reach of their scholars’ work.

To address this challenge, the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) was established to help raise the visibility of African scholarship by mapping current research and communication practices in Southern African universities and by recommending and piloting technical and administrative innovations based on open access dissemination principles. To do this, SCAP conducted extensive research in four faculties at the Universities of Botswana, Cape Town, Mauritius and Namibia.

In the University of Mauritius Faculty of Science, SCAP found that scholars:
• carry heavy teaching and administrative loads which hinder their research productivity
• feel positive about the merits of open access communication, but neither they nor the university has an OA dissemination strategy that would capitalize on this sentiment
• find it easier to collaborate with scholars in the global North than in the rest of Africa
• rarely communicate their research with government
• tend to engage in small, locally-based research projects that are either unfunded or funded by the university
• do not utilize social media technologies to disseminate their work or seek new collaborative opportunities.

All of these factors impact UoM’s research in/visibility at a time when scholarly communication is going through dramatic technical, legal, social and ethical changes.

“Scholarly Communication at the University of Mauritius” shares the results of SCAP’s research and advocacy efforts at UoM’s Faculty of Science. It not only analyses the faculty’s scholarly communication ecosystem, but illuminates the opportunities available for raising the visibility of its scholarship. It concludes with a series of recommendations that would enhance the communicative and developmental potential of the university’s research as a whole.

This study will be of interest for scholars of African higher education, academically linked civil society organizations, educationally affiliated government personnel and university researchers and managers."

Measuring the contribution of each author of a multi-author paper has been a long standing concern. As a possible solution to this, we propose a list of intellectual activities and logistic support activities that might be involved in the production of a research paper. We then develop a quantitative approach to estimate an author’s relative intellectual contribution to a published work. An author’s relative intellectual contribution is calculated as the percent contribution of an author to each intellectual activity involved in the production of the paper multiplied by a weighing factor for each intellectual activity. The relative intellectual contribution calculated in this way can be used to determine the position of an author in the author list of a paper. Second, a corrected citation index for each author, called the T-index, can be calculated by multiplying the relative intellectual contribution by the total citations received by a paper. The proposed approach can be used to measure the impact of an author of a multi-authored paper in a more accurate way than either giving each author full credit or dividing credit equally. Our proposal not only resolves the long  standing concern for the fair distribution of each author’s credit depending on his/her contribution, but it will also, hopefully, discourage addition of non-contributing authors to a paper.

This paper analyses the entire publication history of the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS) by analyzing 1747 documents from 1973 to June 2018. Citation networks were examined from available metadata such as author and index keywords, and institutional affiliations, and abstracts were analyzed using network analysis and text mining techniques. The analysis is supported by the use of data visualization tools and community detection algorithms. Results suggest three main communities addressed throughout JAMS' publication history (firm capability and performance, brand and value co-creation and customer service) and nine main themes (brands' strategic value, firms' strategy and financial performance, customer service, sales, marketing communications, retailing, distribution channel, global markets, and corporate social responsibility). Although empirical quantitative studies account the larger type of research published by JAMS, results also highlight JAMS' contribution to marketing theory building and methodological issues in the shape of both conceptual/theoretical papers and scale development papers.

Publication in quality journals has long been a yardstick for measuring academic performance, although there is a divergence of opinions as to how to define and measure “journal quality”. For some time the primary tools for assessing journal quality have been the ISI Journal Citation Reports and the Journal Impact Factors (JIFs), although it has been argued that these are less appropriate for practical disciplines such as nursing midwifery. In order to accurately reflect the nature of nursing and midwifery as a discipline, given the inherent flaws of using just one indicator of journal quality to assess performance overall, this project was designed to develop a tool which combined both objective and subjective methods to produce a ranking system which is specifically relevant to the disciplines of nursing and midwifery. This project succeeded in developing the Journal Evaluation Tool (JET), through extensive consultations with experts in the fields of nursing and midwifery. This tool may overcome some problems associated with the sole use of the journal impact factor, and may be utilised as an alternative measure of journal quality. The new tool was tested using a sample of 52 responding journals; and has now been disseminated to nursing and midwifery bodies in Australia and New Zealand, along with instructions for its use and recommendations for future research.

Publication in scientific academic journals is a key criterion to appointment, tenure, and
promotion in many universities from the developed countries. Most universities weigh
publications according to the quality or impact of the journal. Traditionally, journal quality has
been assessed through the ISI Journal Impact Factor (JIF), SCImago Journal Rank, Eigenfactor
and many more. However, the above metric system is still a novice or indomitable for many
universities from the underdeveloped and developing countries. This paper proposes an
alternative metric system- World Electronic Journals Impact Factor (WEJ Impact factor). This
metric system will be an alternative mechanism for those journals which does not find a place in
ISI/Thomson Reuters, SCOPUS and other data base. WEJ Impact Factor is an open access
electronic journal metric which uses Google Scholar citation and contribution factor of the
journal, which is based on data from the E-International Scientific Research Journal Consortium
WEJ Impact factor, is calculated based on the contributing factor and citation factor. The
journals are categorized under such as Arts and Humanities, Science, Social Sciences, and
Multidisciplinary before assigning the impact factor. This simple and new method of computing
impact factor provides fair chance for world wide electronic journals to understand the impact
factor of their journals based on quantity, quality, and on contextual level

Caballero-Uribe CV, Viloria-Doria JC, Soriano E. The impact factor of the Pan American and the International official Rheumatology journals: A bibliometric analysis. JCR: Journal of Clinical Rheumatology 2018; 24 (S3): S157. Available in: https://journals.lww.com/jclinrheum/Fulltext/2018/04001/Abstracts,_20th_PANLAR_Meeting___Buenos_Aires,.1.aspx

The increased pressures for high-volume, high-impact publications in English language and the high rejection rates of submitted manuscripts for publications present an often unsurpassable obstacle for (early career) researchers. At the same time, register variation of peer-reviewed journals—that can contribute to whether a paper is accepted for publication—has received little attention. This paper redresses this gap, by investigating the register (especially discourse moves and lexical choices) in 60 published, original-research articles on wastewater treatment published in four Chemical Engineering journals, with impact factor (IF) above 2. Our survey shows that chemical engineering research publications tend to comply with a set of requirements: multidisciplinarity, brevity, co-authorship, focus on the description of practical results (rather than methods), and awareness of non-specialised audiences. Lexical choices were analysed through frequency tables, phrase nets and word trees produced by data visualisation software (ManyEyes). It was found that less discipline-specific vocabulary is used in higher IF journals and this is interpreted within the current context of manuscript publication and consumption. This study concludes that data visualisation can provide an efficient and effective tool for prospective authors that wish to gauge telling details of the sub-register of a specific journal.

The modern science system relies on intense evaluation of scientific publication, in which scientific impact is highly emphasized, but its contribution to the progress of science has been controversial. Focusing on two aspects of the science system, resource allocation and academic career design, this study explores whether these policies, presumably aiming at high-impact research, actually achieve the goal. Drawing on in-depth interviews and econometric analyses of Japanese biology professors, this study first shows that merit-based resource allocation can result in biased resource allocation, and that excessive resource concentration can facilitate low-impact publications. Second, results show that a lack of mobility, in particular inbreeding, increases low-impact publications while international mobility decreases it. The latter effect is found to be mediated by fewer publications in low-impact journals, and thus, internationally mobile academics seem to decide the publication destination more strategically.

Quantifying coauthors’contributions will encourage a healthy dialogue about the meaning of coauthorship and author rank  will promote better consideration of author rank in assessing scientific impact, and will lead to improved ways to measure and report coauthor contributions.

Purpose: The study aimed to examine query strategies that would provide an exhaustive search method to retrieve the most referenced articles within specific categories of critical care. Material and Methods: A comprehensive list of the most cited critical care medicine articles was generated by searching the Science Citation Index Expanded data set using general critical care terms keywords such as "critical care," critical care journal titles, and keywords for subsubjects of critical care. Results: The final database included 1187 articles published between 1905 and 2006. The most cited article was referenced 4909 times. The most productive search term was intensive care. However, this term only retrieved 25% of the top 100 articles. Furthermore, 662 of the top 1000 articles could not be found using any of the basic critical care search terms. Sepsis, acute lung injury, and mechanical ventilation were the most common areas of focus for the articles retrieved. Conclusion: Retrieving frequently cited, influential articles in critical care requires using multiple search terms and manuscript sources. Periodic compilations of most cited articles may be useful for critical care practitioners and researches to keep abreast of important information.

Neurosciences have an important place inside the scientific development of Ibero American countries, and particularly in Cuba. The objective of the current work is to analyze the productivity and visibility of Cuban neuroscientists in the period 2001-2005, and the value of H index as evaluation tool. Web of Science and Scopus were the databases used as information sources. The 24 Cuban neuroscientists in Web of Science were identified, and their scientific production in Scopus was retrieved. For each author, in each database, the following indicators were calculated: total number of published authors, total number of cited articles, proportion of cited articles, total number of citations received, average of citations received by article, and H index. Some variations in the calculated indicators were observed in Scopus with respect to Web of Science. The wide coverage of this database exerted influence on the increment of scientist&#39;s productivity, as well as on the increment of ...

Over the past five years or so, Anglo-American hegemony in human geography has been widely debated. This debate has highlighted the obstacles put in the way of the building of a more international geographical discipline. In this paper, we reflect on the possibilities and also the limitations of Europe as a context for the experimentation with a more cross-national discipline. In doing so, we notice on the one hand the increasing attention towards the Europeanisation of human geography, particularly at an institutional level, but on the other hand we also notice the lack of some basic forms and tools of communication and exchange that might facilitate the mobilisation of scholars around the 'European project'. The paper tries to offer a contribution to this issue by discussing the ways in which a European journal of human geography might be conceived and also concretely organised. In this respect the paper takes into account issues of language, access to scientific knowledge and recognition of cultural and academic diversities.

To achieve a global brain circulation, many Latin American countries have incentivized training abroad and publishing in high impact factor journals. Such internationalization strategies are valuable, but we argue that a knowledge dialogue is a better model for global science to overcome North–South disparities and to achieve both excellence and relevance. Circulation implies transmitting into a system, but dialogue highlights the individuals involved in the exchange. Although extant policies are theoretically adequate means of achieving brain circulation, broader impact criteria (e.g., integrating research and education, enhancing underrepresented groups’ participation, linking science with national goals) would help attain genuine knowledge dialogue. Using the Argentine and Chilean science systems as case studies, particularly regarding environmental inquiry, we found that these principles are not systematically used but that nascent efforts exist. Lessons from home and experiences elsewhere offer guidance to promote and evaluate science in a manner that reconciles the need for global excellence and local socioecological relevance.