Alternative metrics approach to Croatian OA journals

Abstract

There are many ways in which today's readers can express their interest, positive attitude, acknowledgment or tribute to the specific online article. One of the traditional way is to put the article in the reference list, e.g. to cite it in own article. The concept of citation is very old, but recently citations started to be used in the various mathematical formulas, giving us different kind of indicators, very well known as JIF (Journal Impact Factor), SJR (Scimago Journal Rank), Eigenfactor Score, etc. Without intention to diminish the importance of the citations in the peer reviewed journals, channels of the scholarly communications are changing, and papers are used, bookmarked, mentioned, shared, and cited using different platforms and tools, social media and web applications. Trying to capture usage based on visits and downloads, in addition to the citations, can give us more comprehensive picture about popularity and impact of Croatian Open Access (OA) journals, especially having in mind that Web of Science and Scopus are indexing only part of the Croatian scholarly journals.