Abstract
BackgroundThe journal Impact factor (IF) is generally accepted to be a good measurement of the relevance/quality of articles that a journal publishes. In spite of an, apparently, homogenous peer-review process for a given journal, we hypothesize that the country affiliation of authors from developing Latin American (LA) countries affects the IF of a journal detrimentally.Methodology/Principal FindingsSeven prestigious international journals, one multidisciplinary journal and six serving specific branches of science, were examined in terms of their IF in the Web of Science. Two subsets of each journal were then selected to evaluate the influence of author's affiliation on the IF. They comprised contributions (i) with authorship from four Latin American (LA) countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico) and (ii) with authorship from five developed countries (England, France, Germany, Japan and USA). Both subsets were further subdivided into two groups: articles with authorship from one country only and collaborative articles with authorship from other countries. Articles from the five developed countries had IF close to the overall IF of the journals and the influence of collaboration on this value was minor. In the case of LA articles the effect of collaboration (virtually all with developed countries) was significant. The IFs for non-collaborative articles averaged 66% of the overall IF of the journals whereas the articles in collaboration raised the IFs to values close to the overall IF.Conclusion/SignificanceThe study shows a significantly lower IF in the group of the subsets of non-collaborative LA articles and thus that country affiliation of authors from non-developed LA countries does affect the IF of a journal detrimentally. There are no data to indicate whether the lower IFs of LA articles were due to their inherent inferior quality/relevance or psycho-social trend towards under-citation of articles from these countries. However, further study is required since there are foreseeable consequences of this trend as it may stimulate strategies by editors to turn down articles that tend to be under-cited.
Highlights
Scientists from developing countries seek arduously to publish their papers in prestigious mainstream international journals.Submission acceptance influences their career advancement and success in obtaining research grant funding
The 2006 Impact factor (IF) of the two groups for each journal were calculated by the sum of citations given in 2006 to articles published in 2004 and 2005 divided by the number of articles published in these years
Of 4.14 and the total articles an average IF of 6.77. This has to do with the need of great telescopes for obtaining the most impacting results, located in Canarias, Hawaii, South Africa, Texas and Chile and to a privileged access to the Hubble telescope
Summary
Scientists from developing countries seek arduously to publish their papers in prestigious mainstream international journals. Submission acceptance influences their career advancement and success in obtaining research grant funding. The 2006 IFs of the two groups for each journal were calculated by the sum of citations given in 2006 to articles published in 2004 and 2005 divided by the number of articles published in these years. The same procedure was followed to calculate the IFs of groups of articles in these journals from five developed countries, namely, England, France, Germany, Japan and USA, for the purpose of comparison. As far as we know, there have been no studies on the trend of impact of articles published in a given journal with respect to author’s affiliation. We hypothesize that affiliation affects IF of entire subsets of articles when compared with the IF of all articles published by the journal
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