Increased citation of Korean scholarly journals during the years 2008 to 2013

Abstract

Korean academic journals are registered in Korea Citation Index, a government-operated journal indexing system. There has been a constant increase in registry, but whether this change accompanies an increase in quality of the journals has not been determined. In this study, by using the index data of Korea Citation Index, status of journal citation in eight different research fields during the years 2008 to 2013 was analyzed. Impact factors of top 50% journals and the number of the journals with high impact factor increased in all the fields, while the number of journals with low impact factor decreased. The change varied in degree among the different fields, and that in social science and medicine was most positive. These changes appear not to be caused by an increase in self citation, although self citation itself is quite high. International citation of the journals also substantially increased in the fields of science, technology, and medicine. These results indicate a genuine increase in the quality of papers and an improvement in citability of the journals published in Korea. This positive change could be attributed to several factors that include the quality of the information in the papers and the environments that encourage the citation of domestic journals.