Vereinigung Österreichischer Bibliothekarinnen und Bibliothekare
Abstract
Austrian journals in the Journal Citation Reports - a bibliometric analysis (translation of the title). The aim of this bibliometric analysis was to examine how many journals from the social sciences and the sciences published in Austria can be found in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The respective journals were further evaluated as to which academic discipline they pertain, the respective publisher(s), whether they are freely accessible (open access) and in which quartile they can be found in the impact factor ranking. The analysis made it apparent that there are fewer Austrian journals included in the JCR than in comparable countries. While 551 journals of the Science Edition of the JCR were from Switzerland in 2011, the corresponding number for Austria is only 34. Even Slowenia published more journals (10) in the Social Science Edition in 2011 than Austria (7). Furthermore, most Austrian journals are ranked in the lower quartile of the impact factor ranking. Austrian journals only perform well in the plant sciences. Still, if the impact factor ranking is to be taken as a measure of quality of a journal, Austrian journals overall perform rather poorly. In the sciences half of the journals are published by Springer, while there is no such dominance of any particular publisher in the social sciences. Only few of the journals are open access, one in the social sciences and two in the sciences. This article has been written and the underlying analysis have been performed during a course on bibliometrics, which is part of the post-graduate programme on Library and Information Studies. Therefore, this contribution also aims at demonstrating that such bibliometric analyses are even possible in library education. This should encourage librarians to engage more strongly with similar studies in the discourse not only with colleagues but maybe even in the relevant scientific community
