Abstract
Influence of a research journal is usually assessed in contemporary academia by Journal Impact Factor (JIF) given by Journal Citation Reports (JCR) published annually by Clarivate Analytics. JCR also provides Journal Immediacy Index (JII), an additional citation parameter which indicates current impact of journals. These citation based measures are simple arithmetic mean of raw citation counts to source publications. It is opined and empirically tested that three major extraneous citation optimizing factors i.e., Author self-citation (ASC), Journal self-citation (JSC) and Recitation (RC) can inflate these popular citation based metrics. This study examines nineteen Scopus index Library and Information Science (LIS) journals to understand individual as well as unified effects of these three optimizing factors on three popular impact indicators i.e., 2-year JIF, 3-year JIF and JII. It is found that ASC and JSC have noticeable effects on these impact indicators. Further, it is observed that these impact indicators exhibit very poor correlation among them when their values are deduced from raw citation counts, though all of them express simple arithmetic mean values. However, modified impact indicators calculated after excluding citations due to these optimizing factors, exhibit moderate to strong correlation among them. It is therefore concluded that more refined method that can automatically exclude the effect of these optimizing factors in their derivation may be needed for fair assessment of a journal’s relative impact in scholarly communication.
Highlights
Evaluation of journals is essential in contemporary world of formal scholarly communication to delineate a journal’s role in scholarly communications process and to understand its importance in reporting novel ideas and significant findings in a given discipline
The analysis presented in this paper is based on nineteen journals under the subject category of ‘Library and Information Science’ (LIS) from Scopus database
As the synchronic citation window of current year is considered in Journal Immediacy Index (JII), it is quite natural that recitation counts will be very low unless hyper-prolific authors are affected by the idea
Summary
Evaluation of journals is essential in contemporary world of formal scholarly communication to delineate a journal’s role in scholarly communications process and to understand its importance in reporting novel ideas and significant findings in a given discipline. The rising questionable practices in research perhaps have transpired the application of Goodhart’s law in academic publishing which is commonly understood as ‘when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be good measure’.[27] Empirical evidences from large number of studies indicated that several factors can influence citation outcomes of a journal.[7,28,29] Some of these factors are inherent to citation based measure like skewness of citation distributions; others are external factors that can be optimized/manipulated in a large extent like Author self-citations (ASC), Journal selfcitation (JSC), Recitation(RC).[30,31] Among these optimizing factors, JSC is easiest to track and often cause denying JIF value for successive two years of a journal in JCR given by Web of Science (WoS, web version of expanded SCI) of Clarivate Analytics due to excessive JSC.
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