An assessment of quality, trustworthiness and usability of Indonesian agricultural science journals: stated preference versus revealed preference study

Abstract

Scientific journals published in non-English languages may be less accessible to researchers worldwide. Most of them are not covered in international indexing and abstracting databases such as the Web of Science and Scopus, which can influence their impact. Scientific journals published by the Indonesian Agency for Agricultural Research and Development are a case in point, and their impact cannot be ascertained due to the non-existence of a tool that can assist in assessing the performance of the journals. To address this concern, this study aims to (a) assess the quality of Indonesian agricultural science journals; (b) determine how Indonesia-based agricultural science researchers assign and calibrate trust to the journals they use; (c) determine how Indonesia-based agricultural science researchers assess the usability of the journals they read; and (d) produce an internal ranking of Indonesian agricultural journals. The study has been designed as a combination of two approaches, namely revealed preference and stated preference study. The revealed preference study involves citation analysis of the nine journals sampled. The stated preference study gauges the trustworthiness and usability of these journals from the perspectives of the researchers who use them. The revealed preference provides the Journal Quality Index whereas the stated preference study provides the Journal Trust and Journal Usability Index. The study also provides internal ranking and comparison between indicators resulted from the revealed preference and stated preference study. It is also observed that Quality and Trust indices are well correlated and indicate a good model fit with the Overall Index. On the other hand, Usability Index is negatively correlated and shows very less model fit with the Overall Index.