Journal Impact Factor

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.

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.

In this paper I explore the modalities of evaluating research publications in the humanities and, in particular, some of the evaluative practices adopted within the Serbian higher education system. I analyse the structural issues related to the evaluation of scholarly journals in the humanities and propose some practical solutions.
The model currently in place evaluates research productivity primarily by relying on the prestige and selectivity of journals in which research is published as an indirect measure of research quality. The Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development relies
on Web of Science databases (WoS) and, in particular, the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) to determine the quality of particular publication venues. Journals are then divided into four categories based on their ranking in JCR. Because this ranking is determined by the
journal impact factor (IF), within the Serbian system the journal IF effectively functions as a proxy measurement of research quality. This, in turn, has practical consequences for Serbian researchers: because journal articles are assigned points based on the quality of the
journal in which they are published, and because researchers are required to accumulate a defined number of points for the purposes of tenure and promotion, publishing in better ranked journals should enable them to move up the promotion ladder more easily.
However, as I demonstrate in this article, the model of evaluating research publications which relies on IF effectively breaks down when applied to humanistic scholarship. Because IF is generally not used in the humanities, and because WoS doesn’t rank humanistic
journals, there is no quantitative measurement to rely on in evaluating the quality of these journals. However, instead of developing an alternative mechanism for evaluating humanistic scholarship, the Ministry of Education addressed this anomaly by simply
assigning all humanistic journals to the lowest available category of international journals, effectively penalizing researchers in the humanities: whereas researches in the sciences can gain as many as 10 points (1/5 of the points needed for promotion from research fellow to
senior research fellow) for a single article published in a leading international journal, their colleagues in the humanities will be awarded no more than 4 points for publishing in an international journal, regardless of the prestige of the venue.
I suggest that this fundamental weakness of the present system can be amended by introducing the journal rankings used by the Danish Ministry of Education and the Norwegian Center for Research Data (NSD). As I show through an analysis of their treatment of research journals in literary studies, these rankings are very successful in excluding
lower quality publications and in identifying high-quality ones, therefore providing a basis for an appropriate classification of journals in the humanities. Along with various minor adjustments, I propose a classification in which the upper 20% of journals on the Danish
and Norwegian lists are assigned the status of highest-quality international journals which, in turn, assures that articles published in these venues are awarded the same number of points
as articles published in top science journals. This adjustment creates a more equitable and discipline-specific mechanism for evaluating research output and assures that highest quality humanistic scholarship is appropriately valued for the purposes of tenure and promotion.

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.

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

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.

The majority of highway bridges are girder type structures, either single spans or continuous spans. Determining the principal effects of the various loading combinations can often be achieved with a 2-dimensional analytical model but for overall absolute analysis which is actually more complicated a 3-dimensional model is needed. This paper elaborates the correct analysis and modelling techniques for typical prestressed concrete bridge deck girder by using grillage analysis. The structural model is developed as per FE discretization in Staad Pro software. For the purpose of analysis, dead load (self-weight, wearing coat, super imposed dead load, footpath live load) and vehicular live loads are considered as per IRC: 6-2016. A series of applications are executed in order to verify the efficiency and the accuracy. Linear static analysis is carried and the design values of bending moment and shear force for the class A 70 R tracked vehicle are computed.

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.

مما لا شك فيه أن هناك العديد من الصعوبات التي تواجه من يعمل في مجال العلوم من الباحثين والأكاديميين لاختيار المطبوعة أو الدورية العلمية المناسبة لنشر نتائج بحوثهم العلمية، ولهذا أجتهد الباحثون والناشرون لأوعية النشر العلمي في البحث عن وسيلة علمية مرجعية لتقييم المجلات والدوريات العلمية، ومن هنا نشأت فكرة "معامل التّأثير" وهو مقياس لأهميّة المجلات العلميّة المحكّمة ضمن مجال تخصّصها البحثي. ويعكس معامل التّأثير مدى اعتماد الأبحاث العلميّة التي تُنشر حديثاً على عدد المرّات التي يُشار فيها إلى البحوث المنشورة سابقاً في تلك المجلات، واعتمادها مصادر لمعلوماتها، وبذلك تُعدّ المجلة التي تملك معامل تأثير مرتفع من المجلات المهمة في مجال تخصصها.  وتم الإعلان مؤخرا عن البدء في تحديد معامل التأثير العربي، وهو معامل خاص بالمجلات التي تصدر باللغة العربية فقط. ويوفر معامل التأثير العربي تقيم كمي ونوعي لترتيب وتقييم وتصنيف المجلات التي تصدر باللغة العربية للتقييم الأكاديمي وللتميز. ويستخدم هذا المعامل لتقييم جودة صدور هذه المجلات. ويتم إجراء التقييم من خلال النظر في عوامل مثل استعراض عدد الاستشهادات بالبحوث المنشورة في هذه المجلات من قبل المجلات الأخرى، والأصالة والجودة العلمية، والجودة التقنية لهيئة التحرير، ونوعية التحرير وانتظام صدور المجلات، ونظام تحكيم البحوث بها، وأيضا الالتزام بأخلاقيات النشر العلمي.

"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."

Background: In this study, the impact of self-citation (Journal and Author) on impact factor of Iranian English Medical journals in two international citation databases, Web of Science (WoS) and Islamic world science citation center (ISC), were compared by citation analysis.

Methods: Twelve journals in WoS and 26 journals in ISC databases indexed between the years (2006-2009) were selected and compared. For comparison of self-citation rate in two databases, we used Wilcoxon and Mann-whitney tests. We used Pearson test for correlation of self-citation and IF in WoS, and the Spearman’s correlation coefficient for the ISC database.  Covariance analysis was used for comparison of two correlation tests. P. value was 0.05 in all of tests.

Results: There was no significant difference between self-citation rates in two databases (P>0.05). Findings also showed no significant difference between the correlation of Journal self-citation and impact factor in two databases (P=0.526) however, there was significant difference between the author’s self-citation and impact factor in these databases (P<0.001).

Conclusion: The impact of Author’s self-citation in the Impact Factor of WoS was higher than the ISC.

Keywords
Periodicals, Self-Citation, Journal impact factor, Web of science

Рассмотрены наукометрические характеристики белорусских журналов, индексируемых в Science Citation Index Expanded, проведено их сравнение с изданиями, относящимися к той же тематической категории и имеющими лучшие значения импакт-фактора, а также с теми, значение импакт-фактора которых соответствует последней позиции второго квартиля (так называемые «журналы середины списка»). Определено, во сколько раз импакт-фактор издания с наибольшим значением этого показателя и импакт-фактор «журнала середины списка» превышает его значение у индексируемых белорусских журналов. Проведён анализ с целью выяснить, сколько ссылок должен получить белорусский журнал  в дополнение к уже имеющимся, чтобы его импакт-фактор совпадал  с импакт-фактором «журнала середины списка» той же тематической категории. Оценены перспективы индексирования Science Citation Index Expanded тех белорусских журналов, которые представлены в Emerging Sources Citation Index. Даны рекомендации редакционным органам рассматриваемых журналов о том, как укрепить позиции изданий в Science Citation Index Expanded или что делать, чтобы они перешли в эту БД из Emerging Sources Citation Index.

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.

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.

The distribution of scientific citations for publications selected with different rules (author, topic, institution, country, journal, etc…) collapse on a single curve if one plots the citations relative to their mean value. We find that the distribution of &quot;shares&quot; for the Facebook posts rescale in the same manner to the very same curve with scientific citations. This finding suggests that citations are subjected to the same growth mechanism with Facebook popularity measures, being influenced by a statistically similar social environment and selection mechanism. In a simple master-equation approach the exponential growth of the number of publications and a preferential selection mechanism leads to a Tsallis-Pareto distribution offering an excellent description for the observed statistics. Based on our model and on the data derived from PubMed we predict that according to the present trend the average citations per scientific publications exponentially relaxes to about 4.

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.

Eugene Garfield advanced the theory and practice of information science and envisioned information systems that made the discovery of scientific information much more efficient. The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which he founded in Philadelphia in 1960, developed innovative information products that have revolutionized science. ISI provided current scientific information to researchers all over the world by publishing the table of contents of key scientific journals in the journal Current Contents (CC). Garfield introduced the citation as a qualitative measure of academic impact and propelled the concepts of "citation indexing" and "citation linking", paving the way for today's search engines. He created the Science Citation Index (SCI), which raised awareness about citations; triggered the development of new disciplines (scientometrics, infometrics, webometrics); and became the foundation for building new important products such as Web of Science. The journal impact factor (IF), originally designed to select journals for the SCI, became the most widely accepted tool for measuring academic impact. Garfield actively promoted English as the international language of science and became a powerful force in the globalization of research. His ideas changed how researchers gather scientific information, communicate their findings, and advance their careers. This article looks at the impact of Garfield's ideas and legacy on the culture of research.

This 2016 edition of the “top bioethics journals and articles” list includes updated rankings for bioethics journals and new citation metrics for articles published in 2015, as well as updates for previous years’ top articles. This is an updated citation analysis for 2011 through 2015 of the top 100 bioethics journals. I’ve included the top 50 journals and the top cited articles per year including the h5 ranking.  Just over 20,000 articles were analyzed in this dataset, shared here as a spreadsheet.

The Spanish scientific journals on education have experience an exponential growth in recent decades. The reasons are closely related to the supranational policies of university quality assessment, with specific emphasis on research output with "impact". This way, in just twenty years, Spanish journals have become, in detriment of books, in the main channel of communication of the also increasing educational research. In an extremely competitive global context, dominated by Anglo-Saxon culture, the Spanish journals have made a significant improvement in the quality of editorial management processes, in accordance with international quality indicators. However, access to the most recognized indexing, such as Web of Science or Scopus, and especially competing in impact factor (number of citations), is a mission almost impossible for our journals. This article focuses, on the one hand, on the evolution of the Spanish educational journals, the analysis of its growth and its international presence. On the other hand, quality indicators and the indexing that categorize journals, both nationally and globally, as well as its problems and limitations, are discussed. It is a descriptive study that analyzes indicators and classifications of various selective data bases consulted through documentary and digital sources.Finally, it presents a prediction of the short term evolution of impact metrics (altrimetrics) and how they should be addressed. It also discusses the importance of establishing government policies on the assessment of research that are transparent and in accordance with the area where there is a need to combine our scientific production in Spanish and international journals.