How are new citation-based journal indicators adding to the bibliometric toolbox?

The launching of Scopus and Google Scholar, and methodological developments in Social Network Analysis have made many more indicators for evaluating journals available than the traditional Impact Factor, Cited Half-life, and Immediacy Index of the ISI. In this study, these new indicators are compared with one another and with the older ones. Do the various indicators measure new dimensions of the citation networks, or are they highly correlated among them? Are they robust and relatively stable over time? Two main dimensions are distinguished -- size and impact -- which together shape influence. The H-index combines the two dimensions and can also be considered as an indicator of reach (like Indegree). PageRank is mainly an indicator of size, but has important interactions with centrality measures. The Scimago Journal Ranking (SJR) indicator provides an alternative to the Journal Impact Factor, but the computation is less easy

Would it be possible to increase the Hirsch-index, pi-index or CDS-index by increasing the number of publications or citations only by unity?

The aim of the study is to explore the effects of the increase in the number of publications or citations on several impact indicators by a single journal paper or citation. The possible change of the h-index, A-index, R-index, pi-index, pi-rate, Journal Paper Citedness (JPC), and Citation Distribution Score (CDS) is followed by models. Particular attention is given to the increase of the indices by a single plus citation. The results obtained by the “Successively Built-up Indicator” model show that with increasing number of citations or self-citations the indices may increase substantially

Measuring Social Media Activity of Scientific Literature: An Exhaustive Comparison of Scopus and Novel Altmetrics Big Data

This paper measures social media activity of 15 broad scientific disciplines indexed in Scopus database using Altmetric.com data. First, the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database is investigated, overall and across disciplines. Second, the correlation between the bibliometric and altmetric indices is examined using Spearman correlation. Third, a zero-truncated negative binomial model is used to determine the association of various factors with increasing or decreasing citations. Lastly, the effectiveness of altmetric indices to identify publications with high citation impact is comprehensively evaluated by deploying Area Under the Curve (AUC) - an application of receiver operating characteristic. Results indicate a rapid increase in the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database from 10.19% in 2011 to 20.46% in 2015. A zero-truncated negative binomial model is implemented to measure the extent to which different bibliometric and altmetric factors contribute to citation counts. Blog count appears to be the most important factor increasing the number of citations by 38.6% in the field of Health Professions and Nursing, followed by Twitter count increasing the number of citations by 8% in the field of Physics and Astronomy. Interestingly, both Blog count and Twitter count always show positive increase in the number of citations across all fields. While there was a positive weak correlation between bibliometric and altmetric indices, the results show that altmetric indices can be a good indicator to discriminate highly cited publications, with an encouragingly AUC= 0.725 between highly cited publications and total altmetric count. Overall, findings suggest that altmetrics could better distinguish highly cited publications.Comment: 34 Pages, 3 Figures, 15 Table

A bibliometric index based on the complete list of cited Publications

We propose a new index, the j-index, which is defined for an author as the sum of the square roots of the numbers of citations to each of the author’s publications. The idea behind the j-index it to remedy a drawback of the h-index - that the h-index does not take into account the full citation record of a researcher. The square root function is motivated by our desire to avoid the possible bias that may occur with a simple sum when an author has several very highly cited papers. We compare the j-index to the h-index, the g-index and the total citation count for three subject areas using several association measures. Our results indicate that that the association between the j-index and the other indices varies according to the subject area. One explanation of this variation may be due to the proportion of citations to publications of the researcher that are in the h-core. The j-index is not an h-index variant, and as such is intended to complement rather than necessarily replace the h-index and other bibliometric indicators, thus providing a more complete picture of a researcher’s achievements

Testing the SERVQUAL Scale in the Business-to-Business Sector: The Case of Ocean Freight Shipping Service

A key question is whether the instruments developed for consumer services can accurately gauge the service quality perceptions of organisational customers. Reports psychometric testing of the SERVQUAL as a measure of service quality in ocean freight services. Based on a survey of a cross-sectional sample of 114 business organisations in Singapore, which regularly utilise ocean freight services for their export needs, this study found that the psychometric properties of the SERVQUAL scale are at variance with those found in consumer services settings. Further, the SERVQUAL perceptions scores were found to be a better predictor than the SERVQUAL gap scores. In sum, the service quality measures developed for consumer services can only be applied with caution in business-to-business marketing. Implications and future directions for research are discussed

Statistical modelling of citation exchange among statistics journals

Scholarly journal rankings based on citation data are often met with skepticism by the scientific community. Part of the skepticism is due to the discrepancy between the common perception of journals' prestige and their ranking based on citation counts. A more serious concern is the inappropriate use of journal rankings to evaluate the scientific influence of authors. This paper focuses on analysis of the table of cross-citations among a selection of Statistics journals. Data are collected from the Web of Science database published by Thomson Reuters. Our results suggest that modelling the exchange of citations between journals is useful to highlight the most prestigious journals, but also that journal citation data are characterized by considerable heterogeneity, which needs to be properly summarized. Inferential conclusions require care in order to avoid potential over-interpretation of insignificant differences between journal ratings

Stakes are higher, risk is lower: Citation distributions are more equal in high quality journals

Psychology is a discipline standing at the crossroads of hard and social sciences. Therefore it is especially interesting to study bibliometric characteristics of psychology journals. We also take two adjacent disciplines, neurosciences and sociology. One is closer to hard sciences, another is a social science. We study not the journal citedness itself (impact factor etc.) but the citation distribution across papers within journals. This is, so to say, "indicators of the second order" which measure the digression from the journal's average of the citations received by individual papers. As is shown, such information about journals may also help authors to correct their publication strategies.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures. Published in STI 2018 Proceedings: https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/6522