Does Criticism Overcome the Praises of Journal Impact Factor?

Journal impact factor (IF) as a gauge of influence and impact of a particular journal comparing with other journals in the same area of research, reports the mean number of citations to the published articles in particular journal. Although, IF attracts more attention and being used more frequently than other measures, it has been subjected to criticisms, which overcome the advantages of IF. Critically, extensive use of IF may result in destroying editorial and researchers’ behaviour, which could compromise the quality of scientific articles. Therefore, it is the time of the timeliness and importance of a new invention of journal ranking techniques beyond the journal impact factor

Scrambling for higher metrics in the Journal Impact Factor bubble period: a real-world problem in science management and its implications

Universities and funders in many countries have been using Journal Impact Factor (JIF) as an indicator for research and grant assessment despite its controversial nature as a statistical representation of scientific quality. This study investigates how the changes of JIF over the years can affect its role in research evaluation and science management by using JIF data from annual Journal Citation Reports (JCR) to illustrate the changes. The descriptive statistics find out an increase in the median JIF for the top 50 journals in the JCR, from 29.300 in 2017 to 33.162 in 2019. Moreover, on average, elite journal families have up to 27 journals in the top 50. In the group of journals with a JIF of lower than 1, the proportion has shrunk by 14.53% in the 2015–2019 period. The findings suggest a potential ‘JIF bubble period’ that science policymaker, university, public fund managers, and other stakeholders should pay more attention to JIF as a criterion for quality assessment to ensure more efficient science management

Utilising content marketing metrics and social networks for academic visibility

There are numerous assumptions on research evaluation in terms of quality and relevance of academic contributions. Researchers are becoming increasingly acquainted with bibliometric indicators, including; citation analysis, impact factor, h-index, webometrics and academic social networking sites. In this light, this chapter presents a review of these concepts as it considers relevant theoretical underpinnings that are related to the content marketing of scholars. Therefore, this contribution critically evaluates previous papers that revolve on the subject of academic reputation as it deliberates on the individual researchers’ personal branding. It also explains how metrics are currently being used to rank the academic standing of journals as well as higher educational institutions. In a nutshell, this chapter implies that the scholarly impact depends on a number of factors including accessibility of publications, peer review of academic work as well as social networking among scholars.peer-reviewe

Grading mathematics education research journals

Nowadays, all researchers are aware of the increasing importance accorded to the ranking and grading of scientific journals; it is now difficult to escape their influence. The systems that currently exist are often based on crude statistical analyses that have little to do with scientific quality (see e.g. Arnold Fowler 2011). For these reasons, the Education Committee of the European Mathematical Society (EMS), together with the Executive Committee of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (ERME), and supported by the International Commission for Mathematical Instruction (ICMI), decided in 2011 to organize a consultation in order to propose a grading of research journals in mathematics education based on expert judgment. A similar project has already been carried out for Chemical education and Science education journals (Towns Kraft, 2011)

О статистической взаимосвязи между экспертными оценками научных журналов и их импакт-факторами

В статье затронута проблема статистической взаимосвязи (корреляции) между цитируемостью отдельных статей или журналов в целом с одной стороны и реальной оценкой научного сообщества - с другой. Проблема изучена применительно к прикладной математике. За основу взяты исследования, проведенные Австралийским исследовательским советом в 2010 году (с привлечением различных общественных организаций и эксперто

Leveraging Mathematical Subject Information to Enhance Bibliometric Data

The field of mathematics is known to be especially challenging from a bibliometric point of view. Its bibliographic metrics are especially sensitive to distortions and are heavily influenced by the subject and its popularity. Therefore, quantitative methods are prone to misrepresentations, and need to take subject information into account. In this paper we investigate how the mathematical bibliography of the abstracting and reviewing service Zentralblatt MATH (zbMATH) could further benefit from the inclusion of mathematical subject information MSC2010. Furthermore, the mappings of MSC2010 to Linked Open Data resources have been upgraded and extended to also benefit from semantic information provided by DBpedia

Методический подход к оценке цитируемости научных статей российских журналов в разрезе областей науки по данным Web of Science Core Collection. Часть 1

The authors develop and substantiate the methods of assessing Russian science journals citation in six domains as specified by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and, based on Web of Science Core Collection data, make recommendations for promoting Russian journals to the international databases. The authors analyze the methods of citing science journals indexed by the international systems and conclude that there was a need for additional indicators of citation assessment with consideration to the national origins of publications. They suggest the methodological approach based on calculating citation coefficient which is a modified version of impact factor. The key distinctions of the method are the following: the number of citing documents are applied instead of the quotation number; only one document type, i.e. academic papers, is used for calculations; citation widows are varied depending on specificity of six OECD science domains. To distribute articles among the domains the authors developed the OECD – Web of Science Core Collection compliance tables.Исследование направлено на разработку и обоснование методического подхода к оценке цитируемости научных статей российских журналов в разрезе шести областей науки Организации экономического сотрудничества и развития (ОЭСР) и поиск рекомендаций для продвижения российских журналов в международные БД на основе данных Web of Science Core Collection. Авторы проанализировали методологии цитирования научных статей журналов, индексируемых международными системами, и пришли к выводу о необходимости разработки дополнительных индикаторов оценки цитируемости с учётом «национальной принадлежности» издания. Предложен методический подход, основанный на расчёте коэффициента цитирования, который представляет собой модифицированную версию импакт-фактора. Основные отличия этого показателя: вместо числа ссылок на публикации используется число цитирующих документов; в расчёте используется только один тип документов – научные статьи; окна цитирования варьируют в зависимости от специфики шести областей науки ОЭСР. Для распределения научных статей в разрезе областей науки были использованы разработанные авторами таблицы соответствия научных направлений ОЭСР и научных категорий Web of Science Core Collection