An author level metrics of scholarly impact journals; cited through Google Scholar Source

Traditionally, there have been two important media of academic publishing: scholarly journals and scholarly books. The first scholarly journal, the Journal des Sçavans, was founded by Denis de Sallo, appeared already in January 1665 in Paris, reappeared after the French Revolution as the Journal des Savants, and still exists as a leading journal in the humanities. Only a few weeks later, Henry Oldenbourg, the first secretary of the Royal Society of London, established a second scholarly journal, the Philosophical Transactions, with a focus on science. The purpose of these journals was to formalize the extensive correspondence between philosophers and scientists.1 In the 18th and the 19th century, more specialized journals gained in importance, most of which were published by learned societies. At the end of the 19th century, university presses too began to publish scholarly journals. Another traditional means of academic publishing are the various types of scholarly books, in particular monographs, edited volumes, reference works (specialist dictionaries, encyclopedias, and specialty reference manuals), and technical handbooks.2 A narrow definition of academic works would exclude textbooks and books for the broader public. Shavell (2010, 337–39) employs four criteria to determine whether a journal or book is academic in nature: (1) the authors and/or the publisher are usually academics; (2) the readers are mainly academics; (3) the content is academic in character; (4) only low royalties are paid, if any. As of today, scholarly journals are the preferred mode of academic publishing in particular in the sciences and some social sciences (e.g., economics), whereas scholarly books still play an important role in the arts, the humanities, and part of the social sciences. Whereas scholarly books are published by a large number of small national publishers in a multitude of languages, the most important scholarly journals are typically in English language and published by a few large commercial publishers. Until the mid-20th century, the most important journals were published by learned societies, before commercial publishers began to enter the academic publishing market in the 1960s and 1970s by launching new titles or acquiring existing ones. This development has led to a significant concentration of (commercial) publishers in the academic journal market.3 It is difficult to say for sure how many scholarly journals are available around the world. Some sources speak of more than 100,000, others of 87,000 or 73,000.4 In August 2018, Ulrich's Web Directory listed 33,119 active scholarly peer-reviewed English-language journals with about 3 million articles a year, complemented by an additional 9,372 journals in other languages. As an important subset, 11,655 journals with 2.2 million articles were included in the Clarivate Analytics' Journal Citation Reports (STM, 2018, 25–26). The Web of Science (WoS) database counted almost 12,500 journals in 2019 (see below, Section 2.2.1). With the mass expansion of academic education and the increasing size of faculty after World War II, publications in peer-reviewed, highly ranked journals have become an important precondition for academic careers in many disciplines, in particular in the sciences, economics, and partly in the other social sciences. In 1964, Eugene Garfield launched the Science Citation Index to calculate the impact factors of journals in science, medicine, and technology. This index was later followed by the Social Sciences Citation Index in 1973, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index in 1978 (Regazzi, 2015, 86–88), and the Emerging Sources Citation Index in 2015. These indices led to the development of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF), a metric that serves to rank a scholarly journal based on the number of citations to articles in that journal by articles in other indexed journals within a certain time period. During the same time, commercial publishers have increased their market shares to the detriment of non-for-profit publishers, such as learned societies and universities, becoming the dominant players in the market for scholarly journals. Today, the "big five" commercial academic publishers—Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Sage—cover more than half of the market for scholarly journals. Since the 1980s, we have seen a sharp increase not just in the number of journals but in particular also in journal subscription prices, forcing many academic libraries to cancel serials subscriptions and to cut back on new monographs (the so-called serials crisis, cf. Eger & Scheufen, 2018, 23–29). These developments induced an increasing number of scholars, initially in the United States, to promote open access (OA) to scholarly articles as a replacement of or an addendum to the subscription model. After some individual initiatives in the late 1980s, the early 2000s saw the emergence of a global movement by scholars, librarians, and research sponsors, resulting in the "Budapest Open Access Initiative" (February 2002), the "Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing" (June 2003) and the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" (October 2003).7 Two roads to OA can be distinguished8: First, gold OA refers to electronic journals with OA for all readers, often based on creative commons licenses. The publishers' costs are covered not by subscription fees but from other sources, such as article-processing charges (APCs)9 paid by authors, libraries, learned societies, or research sponsors, or subsidies from learned societies and other sources. Hybrid OA journals, whose numbers are rising fast, allow the authors to choose between paying an APC, thereby granting the reader OA, or not paying an APC and requiring the reader to pay for access to the article.10 A special branch of gold OA is mega-journals, the first one of which, PLOS One, was first published in 2006. In these journals, the peer review is restricted to examining only the soundness of the submitted articles but not their broader interest or impact. Also, mega-journals are not oriented towards a specific subject matter. The second road, green OA, refers to authors self-archiving pre-prints or post-prints of their papers on so-called OA repositories, potentially in addition to publication in traditional subscription-based journals. OpenDOAR listed 5,713 repositories in July 2021, of which 5,073 were classified as institutional repositories managed by universities, faculties, or other academic institutions, 364 as disciplinary (subject) repositories which aggregate research papers in specific disciplines (e.g., PubMed Central, arXiv, SSRN, and RepEc), 138 as aggregating repositories (including Academia and Scielo), and 139 as governmental repositories.11 Whereas institutional and disciplinary repositories generally respect the authors' or publishers' copyright, so-called Robin Hood or Pirate OA repositories do not. The most prominent example is Sci-Hub, founded in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan, a young scholar from Kazakhstan, which made over 60 million journal articles publicly available. Due to complaints by academic publishers, Sci-Hub had to switch domains several times.12 Recent years have seen the emergence of academic social networks such as Research Gate and Mendeley, as well as a stream of new forms of disseminating scientific content, including blogs, podcasts, and Facebook posts by prominent scholars. Regarding OA books, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) in June 2021 listed 43,036 academic peer-reviewed books from 621 publishers.13 The number of academic journals, as listed in the WoS database, has been growing steadily over the past two decades, from around 5,000 in 2000 to almost 12,500 in 2019 (Figure 1).14 Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) The academic journal market is dominated by a few large commercial publishers, with the "big five" accounting for more than half of the academic journals listed by the WoS in 2019: Elsevier (1,754 journals), Springer (1,406), Wiley Blackwell (1,242), Taylor & Francis (1,199), and Sage (642).15 However, due to a downturn by Elsevier that began around 2006, this dominance has declined from around 60% in 2000 to around 51.7% in 2019 (Figure 2). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) Coupled with the advent of the internet and the concurrent increasing digitization of academic works, which through the bundling of different journals and/or formats ("big deals") facilitated second-degree price discrimination, this dominance has led to a drastic increase in subscription prices since the early 1990s (Bergstrom, 2013; Eger & Scheufen, 2018; Ramello, 2010). The resulting serials crisis—with academic libraries having to cut their journal portfolio—gave rise to a new publishing regime that offers OA to journal content. The share of pure (i.e., non-hybrid) OA journals as listed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (2021) has been increasing steadily, from around 3% of all WoS-listed journals in 2000 to more than 10% in 2019 (Figure 3). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) and DOAJ (2021) Interestingly, pure OA journals also gained ground in terms of quality. Figure 4 shows boxplots of the impact factors16 of closed access (CA) versus OA journals over time. While CA journals enjoyed an impact factor advantage over OA journals for a long time—all location scales of the impact factor for CA journals being above the ones for OA journals—OA journals are nowadays of the same quality, notwithstanding considerable differences between disciplines (see the contribution by Eger et al. to this issue). In 2019, impact factor distributions of both OA and CA journals are at the same level. Thus, advancing both in quantity and in quality, OA journals are becoming ever more relevant. The literature has identified the following advantages of an OA regime for academic works: (1) OA publications are likely read and therefore (2) cited more widely,17 which in turn (3) raises the incentives for academic authors to publish their research results as citations increase their reputation. These observations led to a broad discussion in academia as to whether the copyright regime may impede the evolution towards a universal OA regime, with very different conclusions being drawn regarding the impact of OA from a social welfare perspective (Scheufen, 2015; Shavell, 2010). Source: Author's calculations based on data from Web of Science (2021) and DOAJ (2021) The growing relevance of academic OA publishing warrants a closer look at the development of pure OA journals as the gold road towards OA. Figure 5 shows the number of newly launched OA journals from 2002 to 2020. Following relatively slow growth from 2002 to 2014, with fewer than 500 new OA journals per year (except 2013), the number has exceeded 1,000 in every year since, peaking in 2017, when more than 2,000 new OA journals were added to the DOAJ database. Today, the DOAJ database counts more than 16,000 OA journals in many different fields of research, published in 80 languages by publishers from 126 countries.18 Source: Author's calculations based on data from DOAJ (2021) Notwithstanding this impressive development, the relevance of OA journals varies substantially across academic disciplines (Figure 6).19 The research field with the largest attributed number of OA journals is Social Sciences (3,817), followed by Health Sciences (2,785), Technology and Engineering (1,416), and Language and Literature (1,153). By contrast, the natural science fields of Mathematics & Statistics (341), Physics & Astronomy (274), and Chemistry (181) feature only few OA journals.20 Source: Author's calculations based on data from DOAJ (2021) Remarkable differences also exist regarding a variety of OA journal characteristics (Table 1).21 Most (52%) OA journals leave the copyright of published works with the author, whereas the traditional CA regime demands that the exploitation rights are transferred to the publisher. Moreover, only around 28% of all OA journals charge APCs—a remarkable finding, as the OA regime implies the transition from a "reader pays" to an "author pays" model. Other fees (e.g., a submission fee to cover the review process) are charged by only around 2% of all OA journals. Nevertheless, author fees may constitute a significant obstacle for authors to publish in an OA venue, especially for non-tenured researchers seeking to publish in highly ranked journals, which are most likely to charge APCs (Budzinski et al., 2020). This obstacle also applies in particular to many researchers from developing countries, whose institutions rarely cover such costs. Yet 18% of OA journals provide for the possibility to waive such author fees. OA publishing may indeed be considered a form of development aid, for two reasons: First, few institutions in the developing world have so far been able to subscribe to academic journals. The OA regime can thus promote scientific participation and thereby foster the global evolution of science as a "trial and error" process. Free or cheaper access to literature for researchers in the developing world tends to increase both their output (number of publications) and input (number of references) (Mueller-Langer et al., 2020). Second, an OA regime grants access to the latest results in science for groups who were previously excluded because they are not "club" members of a university library. This includes, e.g., corporate researchers, physicians, or farmers. Notwithstanding all the changes discussed above, scholarly journals remain the most important medium of communication in many disciplines. For more than 300 years, they have been fulfilling the four key functions of registration (attribution), certification of articles (peer review), dissemination (distribution, access), and preservation (scholarly memory and permanent archiving). In recent decades, a fifth function must be added: the evaluation of researchers and their institutions.22 The increasing importance of OA articles in scholarly journals has triggered some controversial discussions, in particular regarding the questions as to whether OA negatively affects the quality of journal articles, whether OA improves the dissemination of research results, and how OA affects the competition between academic publishers as well as the distribution between academics and non-academics, between poor and rich universities, and between poor and rich countries. We shall discuss each of these questions and some related points in more detail below. In times when "alternative facts" tend to trump sound research results, academia must provide the public with reliable information. The users of this information should be sufficiently certain that the results are based on proper methods, reflect the state of science in the specific field, and were obtained independently, e.g., of any political or commercial interests.23 For that reason, strict and continuous quality control of research results is a "conditio sine qua non" for academic publishing. Facilitating the communication of content from authors to readers, the academic journal market may be characterized as a two-sided market (Rochet & Tirole, 2003). While readers look for the most important research results in their fields by top authors, the latter are interested in the journal's reputation, in wide readership, and in citations. Thus, journals with high impact factors hold the greatest attraction to both sides. With this in mind, the crucial question arises what effect, if any, OA is likely to have on the quality of academic articles. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado in Denver, is very skeptical regarding the quality of OA articles, especially those that are financed by APCs: "By adding a financial component to the front end of the scholarly publishing process, the open-access movement will ultimately corrupt scholarly publishing and hurt the communication and sharing of novel knowledge" (Beall, 2013, 590). A weak form of "corruption" would to OA publishers' incentives to peer review and to more submitted papers in to increase from However, the commercial publishers' incentives to increase the number of articles to the detriment of the journal's quality at the the quality the APCs that the journal is able to as well as A form of "corruption" refers to the of some OA journal publishers have been to in particular young and who on publications for their or to allow authors to publish articles in OA journals, by articles with or peer academics on their the or of journals, and so In established a of publishers, which was in January in to not only from the publishers but also from OA who that the to to OA. this quality to be a one which exists only in some disciplines (e.g., economics), whereas in other disciplines, such as some OA journals are the ranked journals and there is of a quality researchers their and if academic institutions and research to the APCs for articles by journals, this is to A by is that OA may new and will new and of their will remain (Beall, 2013, 590). However, this is a of the process, of whether the was submitted to a traditional or an OA and many prominent which that articles are generally more likely to the review than and creative but ones. In their contribution to this special & in a two-sided that OA can be a feature of journals. The have seen an increasing both of data on any subject and of that serves to that data almost there has been a of articles in every For such articles, the peer for quality A can be made between pure the same data and the same are as in the and scientific which (1) different data but the same (2) the same data but new methods, or (3) new data and new A to a on (1) the of an or in previously published (2) the impact of the (3) the of and (4) the of to publish Whereas some years when data were on the of mainly of technical copyright and data are the of Regarding the first journals in have already been including an OA journal by University with a focus on Technology and and the Journal for in by Springer the years or a number of in several disciplines have that the results of many when published in highly ranked journals, not be many academics to speak of a The is to the quality of research by access to data so as to be able to results of and or the incentives to the in the first Another important question is whether digitization and the internet have facilitated the quality of of their scholarly and and of their the quality of academic researchers and of is based on which were to provide a metric for journals with each 2019, being a of the citations to all articles in a journal but not of the citations to the individual articles. 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Publish and perish

The Impact of Ophthalmology

This article investigates the discourses of academic legitimacy that surround the production, consumption, and accreditation of online scholarship. Using the web-based media and cultural studies journal (http://journal.media-culture.org.au) as a case study, it examines how online scholarly journals often position themselves as occupying a space between the academic and the popular and as having a functional advantage over print-based media in promoting a spirit of public intellectualism. The current research agenda of both government and academe prioritises academic research that is efficient, self-promoting, and relevant to the public. Yet, although the cost-effectiveness and public-intellectual focus of online scholarship speak to these research priorities, online journals such as M/C Journal have occupied, and continue to occupy, an unstable position in relation to the perceived academic legitimacy of their content. Although some online scholarly journals have achieved a limited form of recognition within a system of accreditation that still privileges print-based scholarship, I argue that this, nevertheless, points to the fact that traditional textual notions of legitimate academic work continue to pervade the research agenda of an academe that increasingly promotes flexible delivery of teaching and online research initiatives.

Background Citations of papers are positively influenced by the journal's impact factor (IF). For non-open access (non-OA) journals, this influence may be due to the fact that high-IF journals are more often purchased by libraries, and are therefore more often available to researchers, than low-IF journals. This positive influence has not, however, been shown specifically for papers published in open access (OA) journals, which are universally accessible, and do not need library purchase. It is therefore important to ascertain if the IF influences citations in OA journals too. Methods 203 randomized controlled trials (102 OA and 101 non-OA) published in January 2011 were included in the study. Five-year citations for papers published in OA journals were compared to those for non-OA journals. Source papers were derived from PubMed. Citations were retrieved from Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar databases. The Thompson-Reuter's IF was used. Results OA journals were found to have significantly more citations overall compared to non-OA journals (median 15.5 vs 12, p=0.039). The IF did not correlate with citations for OA journals (Spearman's rho =0.187, p=0.60). The increase in the citations with increasing IF was minimal for OA journals (beta coefficient = 3.346, 95% CI -0.464, 7.156, p=0.084). In contrast, the IF did show moderate correlation with citations for articles published in non-OA journals (Spearman's rho=0.514, p<0.001). The increase in the number of citations was also significant (beta coefficient = 4.347, 95% CI 2.42, 6.274, p<0.001). Conclusion It is better to publish in an OA journal for more citations. It may not be worth paying high publishing fees for higher IF journals, because there is minimal gain in terms of increased number of citations. On the other hand, if one wishes to publish in a non-OA journal, it is better to choose one with a high IF.

Background Citations of papers are positively influenced by the journal’s impact factor (IF). For non-open access (non-OA) journals, this influence may be due to the fact that high-IF journals are more often purchased by libraries, and are therefore more often available to researchers, than low-IF journals. This positive influence has not, however, been shown specifically for papers published in open access (OA) journals, which are universally accessible, and do not need library purchase. It is therefore important to ascertain if the IF influences citations in OA journals too. Methods 203 randomized controlled trials (102 OA and 101 non-OA) published in January 2011 were included in the study. Five-year citations for papers published in OA journals were compared to those for non-OA journals. Source papers were derived from PubMed. Citations were retrieved from Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar databases. The Thompson-Reuter’s IF was used. Results OA journals were found to have significantly more citations overall compared to non-OA journals (median 15.5 vs 12, p=0.039). The IF did not correlate with citations for OA journals (Spearman’s rho =0.187, p=0.60). The increase in the citations with increasing IF was minimal for OA journals (beta coefficient = 3.346, 95% CI -0.464, 7.156, p=0.084). In contrast, the IF did show moderate correlation with citations for articles published in non-OA journals (Spearman’s rho=0.514, p<0.001). The increase in the number of citations was also significant (beta coefficient = 4.347, 95% CI 2.42, 6.274, p<0.001). Conclusion It is better to publish in an OA journal for more citations. It may not be worth paying high publishing fees for higher IF journals, because there is minimal gain in terms of increased number of citations. On the other hand, if one wishes to publish in a non-OA journal, it is better to choose one with a high IF.

Online Publication and the Impact Factor

The main goal of this article is to describe the purpose and content of a new branch of bibliometrics: ALMetrics (Author- Level Metrics). ALMetrics is focused on the quantitative analysis of an author’s performance by measuring the dimensions of their intellectual activity as shown through varied metric indicators. This article will list, define, and classify the different metrics that are offered in newer information portals that showcase the scientific activity of authors. These metrics are grouped into five sets: bibliometrics (publication and citation), usage, participation, rating, social connectivity, and composite indicators. This new bibliometric specialty is necessary because of new trends in scientific assessment, which have moved analysis away from old bibliometrics (based on journal analysis and Impact Factor) towards new bibliometrics that analyze both documents and authors via a mix of indicators. Most importantly, ALMetrics responds to the researchers’ desire for both knowledge and acknowledgement.

Misuse of Journal Impact Factors in Scientific Assessment

Impact Factors and Other Measures of a Journal's Influence

After changing its language from Korean or English to English only in 2010, the journal metrics of Diabetes & Metabolism Journal (DMJ) were analyzed to assess whether this change in the journal policy was successful. The journal metric items that were analyzed were the following: impact factor; total citations; countries of authors; proportion of the articles funded out of the total number of original articles; and Hirsch-index (H-index). A retrospective, descriptive analysis was carried out using various databases, such as KoreaMed, Korean Medical Citation Index (KoMCI), KoreaMed Synapse, Web of Science, and Journal Citation Ranking. The journal's impact factor was 2.054, which corresponds to 83/122 (68.0%) out of the 2012 JCR endocrinology and metabolism category. The number of the journal's total citations was 330 in 2013. In addition to Korean authors, authors from 13 other countries published papers in the journal from 2010 to 2013. The number of funded papers from 2010 to 2013 was 65 out of 148 original articles (43.9%). The journal's H-index from KoreaMed Synapse was 7, and that from Web of Science was 9. It can be concluded that changing the journal's language to English was successful based on journal metrics. DMJ is currently positioned as an international journal based on the international diversity of authors and editors, its sufficiently high proportion of funded articles, its relatively high impact factor, and the number of total citations.

<i>Epilepsia</i> and the rough seas of medical publishing

Sir, Impact factor is one of the most important tools in evaluating the quality of science journals. Perhaps, it is the only factor known to most researchers today and it has been used by many individuals and institutions. For instance, authors prefer to publish in high impact journals, editors make effort to increase the journal’s impact factor and academic institutions take impact factors into consideration for hiring, promotion or financial incentives. In addition, granting agencies use it to evaluate the quality of applicant’s publications, and governments rank academic institutions based on impact factors. Thomson Reuters, the owner of the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), a company specialized in producing various research analysis tools, produces impact factors of numerous journals. ISI generates Journal Citation Reports (JCR), a database containing information about journals including the number of articles and reviews, and impact factors. Impact factor is calculated using a predefined formula. For example, impact factor for the year 2000 is calculated based on the number of citations to 1998 articles in the year 2000 (A), the number of citations to 1999 articles in the year 2000 (B), the number of articles published in the year 1998 (C ) and the number of articles published in the year 1999 (D). Impact factor for 2000 is therefore (A þ B)/(C þ D). In recent years, more tools have been developed to allow researchers to analyze citation indices for various journals. Among those tools is Scopus (2009) citation database produced by Elsevier which is a large citations and publications database. It has various analytical tools including citation tracker and information about individual articles. Using the information provided by Scopus, one can calculate impact factor of any journal including Human Reproduction. In general, Human Reproduction publishes (or has published in the past) original articles, reviews, letters, editorials, notes, conference papers and short surveys. In JCR, impact factor is calculated based on citations to research articles and reviews. Using the same type of articles, we calculated impact factors of Human Reproduction for the years 2000–2006 with Scopus database, and we compared the results with those obtained from JCR. We found discrepancies in the number of articles and review articles produced by JCR and Scopus (data not shown). The impact factors reported by JCR are also consistently lower than those using Scopus database (Fig. 1). It is unclear which articles were used by JCR to calculate the impact factor. Indeed, a few authors have suggested that these articles should be listed on JCR website (Rossner et al., 2008). Similarly, Scopus could not disclose their exact method of data collection of the number of articles for any journal (personal communication). Identification of articles used for impact factors would be useful to evaluate whether journals with high impact factor are definitely better than those with lower impact factor. High quality articles lead to many citations increasing the impact factor. However, ordinary and yet highly controversial articles might also attract a good number of authors to reply or perform a similar study and cite the paper (Rossner et al., 2008). As a result, controversial articles may increase the impact factor of a journal. The number of authors per article and the number of review articles might influence the impact factor as well. It is possible that multi-author articles receive a higher number of self-citations (Sala and Brooks, 2008). Also, review articles tend to be quoted more often than original research papers. We should consider developing new tools to assess the real impact of scientific journals and differentiate between positive and negative impacts, both of them might lead to an increase in the impact factor of a journal.

IntroductionStroke registries represent a main source of data to the advances of medical literature. In stroke medicine, they serve as key points of discussion and elaboration for future clinical trials,...

Blockbuster effect of COVID-19 on the impact factor of infectious disease journals