ON THE PROBLEMS OF IDENTIFICATION OF INFORMATION SOURCES BEING DISCOVERED IN THE COURSE OF CITATION STUDIES WITH THE USE OF JOURNAL CITATION REPORTS®

Abstract

During the citation study of serial publications with the use of Journal Citation Reports®(JCR) a number of items are being revealed (among others) which abbreviated titles cannot be identified with the use of the JCR itself. Typically, such sources are considered unimportant, because they do not have an «impact factor». However, our analysis of the information sources, which abbreviated titles could not be identified with the use of the Journal Citation Reports® itself, convinced us that such sources can be really useful for the specialists. It was also discovered that in the JCR there are mistakes of writing of abbreviated titles in two different ways that relate even the periodicals included in the «master list», i. e. the sources having abbreviated titles established for JCR. The content of the present citation study of serial publications in relation to their ability to support research in the subject of «energy security and energy efficiency, energy efficient technologies and appliances» has made it possible to identify a number of different consequences of such mistakes and the reasons for them. It was found, for example, that the use of double and multiple different abbreviations for the titles of the same serial publication is either due to their objectively existing dual title misinterpreted by the indexers, or due to the inclusion in the citation data of the JCR full titles of the serial publications along with the abbreviated ones, and also by the inclusion in such data in some cases the year of publication or by indicating that the publication issue represents the conference proceedings. All the hard-to-identify abbreviations compel a bibliometrician to take time-consuming laborious identifications and verifications of such titles often followed by the recount of the resulting data.