Download - Where Should I Publish?
Elaine M. Lasda BergmanBibliographer for Social Welfare,
Gerontology and Dewey [email protected]
March 29, 2012
Introduction
• Many factors go into choosing journal
• Relevance
• Prestige
• Who will accept my article?
• Visibility
Identifying Key Journals in the field
• Two basic approaches:
– Reputation approach
– Bibliometric approach
REPUTATION APPROACH
Reputation approach
• Perceived quality of journals by scholars within field
• Evaluative
• Editorial board composition
• Where journal is indexed (which databases)
Where to find this type of ranking
• Journal articles : surveys, polls, etc. assessing expert opinion/recognition/value of journals in field
• Subject database searches
• Anecdotal info from mentors, colleagues, peers
• Journal website (for editorial board)
• Ulrich’s (for database indexing)
• ASK YOUR SUBJECT BIBLIOGRAPHER
Why use Reputation approach?
• “Name Brand”
– publish in a well known journal implies visibility
• Interdisciplinary fields or narrow subfields
– Bibliometric measurements may not adequatelyreflect influence, prestige of journals that fall outside of traditional disciplinary lines
• Can be a mark of “quality” as opposed to influence, prestige, other bibliometric indicators
• Can be more important than bibliometrics
Disadvantages to reputation approaches
• Difficult to quantify if no published studies, or the studies are dated
• In a small subspecialty, the broader group of academics in your discipline many not know your journal
• Emerging fields may not have journals with any sort of reputation
• Subjective nature of expert opinion
BIBLIOMETRIC APPROACH
What is bibliometrics?
• Scholarly communication: tracing the history and evolution of ideas from one scholar to another
• Measures the scholarly influence of articles, journals, scholars
The birth of citation analysis
• Eugene Garfield: “father of citation analysis” developed the first bibliometric index tools
• Citation indexes and Journal Citation Reports
– “ISI Indexes”: Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, Arts and Humanities Index
• Better coverage on hard sciences than on social sciences and worse still on humanities
Garfield’s metrics
• Citation count
• Impact Factor
• Immediacy Index
• Citation Half-Life
Citation count
• Number of times cited within a given time period
– Author
– Journal
• Does not take into account
– Materials not included in citation database
– Self citations
Impact factor
• Measures “impact” of a journal (not an article) within a given subject
• Formula is a ratio:
– Number of citations to a journal in a given year from articles occurring in the past 2 years Divided by the number of scholarly articles published in the journal in the past 2 years
Concerns with Impact Factor
• Cannot be used to compare cross disciplinary (per Garfield himself) due to different rates of publication and citation
• Two year time frame not adequate for non-scientific disciplines
• Coverage of some disciplines not sufficient in the ISI databases
• Is a measure of “impact” a measure of “quality”?
Immediacy index
• What it’s supposed to measure: how quickly articles in a given journal have an impact on the discipline
• Formula: the average number of times an article in a journal in a given year was cited in that same year
Citation Half-Life
• What it’s supposed to measure: duration of relevance of articles in a given journal
• Formula: median age of articles cited for a particular journal in a given year
TWENTY FIRST CENTURY TOOLS
Influence of Google Page Rank
• Eigenvector analysis:
– “The probability that a researcher, in documenting his or her research, goes from a journal to another selecting a random reference in a research article of the first journal. Values obtained after the whole process represent a ‘random research walk’ that starts from a random journal to end in another after following an infinite process of selecting random references in research articles. A random jump factor is added to represent the probability that the researcher chooses a journal by means other than following the references of research articles.” (Gonzales-Pereira, et.al., 2010)
Sources Using ISI Data
Eigenfactor.org http://libguides.library.albany.edu/content.php?pid=60086&sid=441804
• Uses ISI data
• Similar to PageRank
• Listed in JCR as of 2009
• Eigenfactor Score :
– Influence of the citing journal divided by the total number of citations appearing in that journal
• Example: Neurology (2006): score of .204 = an estimated 0.2% of all citation traffic of journals in JCR (Bergstrom & West, 2008).
• Larger journals will have more citations and therefore will have larger eigenfactors
Article Influence Score
• From Eigenfactor: measure of prestige of a journal
• Average influence, per article of the papers on a journal
• Comparable to the Impact Factor
• Corrects for the issues of journal size in the raw Eigenfactor score
• Neurology’s 2006 article influence score = 2.01. Or that an avg. article in Neurology is 2X as influential as an avg. article in all of JCR
Journal Citation Reports (JCRWeb)
• Library website ->Databases->Search by Name ->J
• http://library.albany.edu
NEW SOURCES FOR CITATION INFORMATION
Scopus
Google Scholar
Scopus: alternate database of citation data
• Review panel, i.e., quality control
• Bigger field than ISI: covers all the journals in WoS and more
• Strongest in “hard” sciences, ostensibly improved social science coverage, arts and humanities: are “getting there”
• Algorithmically determined with human editing
Scopus analytics
• SJR/SCIMago
• SNIP
• Citation Count
• Document count
• % Not Cited
• % Review Articles (not original research)
SNIP (Source Normalized Impact Per Paper)
• Journal Ranking based on citation analysis with adjustments for the frequency of citations of the other journals within the field (the field is all journals citing this particular journal)
• SNIP is defined as the ratio of the journal’s citation count per paper and the citation potential in its subject field. (Moed, 2009)
SJR:SCImago Journal Rank
• What it’s supposed to measure: “current “average prestige per paper”
• SCImago website uses journal/citation data from Scopus, and is also available from Scopus
• Formula: citation time window is 3 years instead of 2 like JIF
• Corrections for self citations
• Strong correlation to JIF
SCImago Journal Rank
• Prestige factors include: number of journals in db, number of papers from journal in database, citation numbers and “importance” received from other journals: size dependent: larger journals have greater prestige values
• Normalized by the number of significant works published by the journal: helps correct for size variations
• Corrections made for journal self citations
Scopus
• Library website->databases->search by name->S
• http://library.albany.edu
Google Scholaralternate database of citation data
• No rhyme or reason to what is included
• Biggest source of citation data
• Foreign language sources
• Sources other than scholarly journals
• Entirely algorithmically determined, no human editing
• AVAILABLE METRICS NOT GOOD FOR JOURNAL RANKING
Google Scholar
• Publish or Perish
• CIDS
Publish or Perish
• Provides a variety of metrics for measuring scholarly impact and output.
• More useful for metrics on authors than journals or institutions
• Uses Google Scholar citation information
• Useful for interdisciplinary topics, fields relying heavily on conference papers or reports, non-English language sources, new journals, etc.
• Continuously updated since 2006
Publish or Perish Metrics
• Basic metrics:
– # papers, #citations, active years, years since first published, average #of citations per paper, average # of citations per year, average # citations per author, etc.
• Complex metrics
– H index (and its many variations, mquotient, g-index (corrects h-index for variations in citation patterns), AR index, AW index
• Does not have any corrections for SELF CITATIONS
CIDS
• Measures output of authors for prestige and influence
• Similar to PoP
• Corrects for Self-Citations
CIDS metrics
• Citations per year, h-index, g-index, total citations, average cites per paper, self citations included and excluded, etc.
Why use Bibliometric approach
• Considered empirical evidence of journal use
• Means of tracing the evolution of scholarship in a topic/discipline
Disadvantages to Bibliometric approach
• Prestigious, but small journals in a subspecialty may not rank as highly in JCR and other metrics as general publications
• “impact” vs. “quality”
• Editors tend to publish articles which cite their own journal – increase self citation and their own ranking
• There are many reasons to cite a work, not all of them good!
OTHER METRICS
Other Metrics
• Journal Acceptance Rates
– Cabell’s Directory of Publishing Opportunities
• Various disciplines
– Journal website (sometimes)
– Information from professional associations
– ASK YOUR SUBJECT BIBLIOGRAPHER
Other Metrics
• Ulrichsweb
– Comprehensive directory of published journals and periodical literature
– Circulation stats, referee status, publisher, frequency of publication, etc.
Library website->databases->search by name-> U
http://library.albany.edu
Other Metrics: The Future?
• Online “Clicks” or downloads
• MESUR
What does it all mean for Tenure and Promotion?
• Choosing the right journal is a balancing act
• No one bibliometric indicator is the final word on journal “quality”
• Reputation and bibliometrics in tandem can paint a positive picture of your journal choice
• Bibliometrics can also be applied to an individual scholar’s work
Final thought:
• The ranking or prestige of a journal is *not necessarily* an indicator of the quality of an individual article published in it.
• To judge the quality of an individual article, READ THE ARTICLE
QUESTIONS?
Elaine M. Lasda BergmanSocial Welfare, Gerontology and Dewey Reference BibliographerDewey Graduate [email protected]