The document discusses the methodologies for selecting academic journals in the fields of social welfare and gerontology, focusing on two main approaches: the reputation and bibliometric approaches. It elaborates on the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, including the importance of reputation based on scholarly opinion and the quantitative measures provided by bibliometrics, such as citation counts and impact factors. Additionally, it highlights various tools and databases for assessing journal quality, emphasizing that no single metric should determine the quality of a journal or article.

1. Elaine M. Lasda Bergman
Bibliographer for Social Welfare,
Gerontology and Dewey Reference
elasdabergman@albany.edu
March 29, 2012

2. Introduction
• Many factors go into choosing journal
• Relevance
• Prestige
• Who will accept my article?
• Visibility

3. Identifying Key Journals in the
field
• Two basic approaches:
– Reputation approach
– Bibliometric approach

4. REPUTATION APPROACH

5. Reputation approach
• Perceived quality of journals by scholars within
field
• Evaluative
• Editorial board composition
• Where journal is indexed (which databases)

6. Where to find this type of ranking
• Journal articles : surveys, polls, etc. assessing
expert opinion/recognition/value of journals in
field
• Subject database searches
• Anecdotal info from mentors, colleagues, peers
• Journal website (for editorial board)
• Ulrich’s (for database indexing)
• ASK YOUR SUBJECT BIBLIOGRAPHER

7. Why use Reputation approach?
• “Name Brand”
– publish in a well known journal implies visibility
• Interdisciplinary fields or narrow subfields
– Bibliometric measurements may not adequately
reflect influence, prestige of journals that fall outside
of traditional disciplinary lines
• Can be a mark of “quality” as opposed to
influence, prestige, other bibliometric indicators
• Can be more important than bibliometrics

8. Disadvantages to reputation
approaches
• Difficult to quantify if no published studies, or
the studies are dated
• In a small subspecialty, the broader group of
academics in your discipline many not know your
journal
• Emerging fields may not have journals with any
sort of reputation
• Subjective nature of expert opinion

9. BIBLIOMETRIC APPROACH

10. What is bibliometrics?
• Scholarly communication: tracing the history and
evolution of ideas from one scholar to another
• Measures the scholarly influence of articles,
journals, scholars

11. The birth of citation analysis
• Eugene Garfield: “father of citation analysis”
developed the first bibliometric index tools
• Citation indexes and Journal Citation Reports
– “ISI Indexes”: Science Citation Index, Social Science
Citation Index, Arts and Humanities Index
• Better coverage on hard sciences than on social
sciences and worse still on humanities

12. Garfield’s metrics
• Citation count
• Impact Factor
• Immediacy Index
• Citation Half-Life

13. Citation count
• Number of times cited within a given time period
– Author
– Journal
• Does not take into account
– Materials not included in citation database
– Self citations

14. Impact factor
• Measures “impact” of a journal (not an article)
within a given subject
• Formula is a ratio:
– Number of citations to a journal in a given year from
articles occurring in the past 2 years Divided by the
number of scholarly articles published in the journal
in the past 2 years

15. Concerns with Impact Factor
• Cannot be used to compare cross disciplinary
(per Garfield himself) due to different rates of
publication and citation
• Two year time frame not adequate for non-scientific
disciplines
• Coverage of some disciplines not sufficient in the
ISI databases
• Is a measure of “impact” a measure of “quality”?

16. Immediacy index
• What it’s supposed to measure: how quickly
articles in a given journal have an impact on the
discipline
• Formula: the average number of times an article
in a journal in a given year was cited in that same
year

17. Citation Half-Life
• What it’s supposed to measure: duration of
relevance of articles in a given journal
• Formula: median age of articles cited for a
particular journal in a given year

18. TWENTY FIRST CENTURY TOOLS

19. Influence of Google Page Rank
• Eigenvector analysis:
– “The probability that a researcher, in documenting his or her
research, goes from a journal to another selecting a random
reference in a research article of the first journal. Values
obtained after the whole process represent a ‘random
research walk’ that starts from a random journal to end in
another after following an infinite process of selecting random
references in research articles. A random jump factor is added
to represent the probability that the researcher chooses a
journal by means other than following the references of
research articles.” (Gonzales-Pereira, et.al., 2010)

20. Sources Using ISI Data

21. Eigenfactor.org
http://libguides.library.albany.edu/content.php?pid=60086&sid=441804
• Uses ISI data
• Similar to PageRank
• Listed in JCR as of 2009
• Eigenfactor Score :
– Influence of the citing journal divided by the total number of
citations appearing in that journal
• Example: Neurology (2006): score of .204 = an estimated 0.2% of
all citation traffic of journals in JCR (Bergstrom & West, 2008).
• Larger journals will have more citations and therefore will have
larger eigenfactors

22. Article Influence Score
• From Eigenfactor: measure of prestige of a journal
• Average influence, per article of the papers on a journal
• Comparable to the Impact Factor
• Corrects for the issues of journal size in the raw
Eigenfactor score
• Neurology’s 2006 article influence score = 2.01. Or that
an avg. article in Neurology is 2X as influential as an avg.
article in all of JCR

23. Journal Citation Reports
(JCRWeb)
• Library website ->Databases->Search by Name ->J
• http://library.albany.edu

24. Scopus
Google Scholar
NEW SOURCES FOR CITATION
INFORMATION

25. Scopus:
alternate database of citation data
• Review panel, i.e., quality control
• Bigger field than ISI: covers all the journals in
WoS and more
• Strongest in “hard” sciences, ostensibly improved
social science coverage, arts and humanities: are
“getting there”
• Algorithmically determined with human editing

26. Scopus analytics
• SJR/SCIMago
• SNIP
• Citation Count
• Document count
• % Not Cited
• % Review Articles (not original research)

27. SNIP
(Source Normalized Impact Per Paper)
• Journal Ranking based on citation analysis with
adjustments for the frequency of citations of the
other journals within the field (the field is all
journals citing this particular journal)
• SNIP is defined as the ratio of the journal’s
citation count per paper and the citation
potential in its subject field. (Moed, 2009)

28. SJR:SCImago Journal Rank
• What it’s supposed to measure: “current
“average prestige per paper”
• SCImago website uses journal/citation data from
Scopus, and is also available from Scopus
• Formula: citation time window is 3 years instead
of 2 like JIF
• Corrections for self citations
• Strong correlation to JIF

29. SCImago Journal Rank
• Prestige factors include: number of journals in
db, number of papers from journal in database,
citation numbers and “importance” received
from other journals: size dependent: larger
journals have greater prestige values
• Normalized by the number of significant works
published by the journal: helps correct for size
variations
• Corrections made for journal self citations

30. Scopus
• Library website->databases->search by name->S
• http://library.albany.edu

31. Google Scholar
alternate database of citation data
• No rhyme or reason to what is included
• Biggest source of citation data
• Foreign language sources
• Sources other than scholarly journals
• Entirely algorithmically determined, no human
editing
• AVAILABLE METRICS NOT GOOD FOR JOURNAL
RANKING

32. Google Scholar
• Publish or Perish
• CIDS

33. Publish or Perish
• Provides a variety of metrics for measuring scholarly
impact and output.
• More useful for metrics on authors than journals or
institutions
• Uses Google Scholar citation information
• Useful for interdisciplinary topics, fields relying heavily
on conference papers or reports, non-English language
sources, new journals, etc.
• Continuously updated since 2006

34. Publish or Perish Metrics
• Basic metrics:
– # papers, #citations, active years, years since first
published, average #of citations per paper, average #
of citations per year, average # citations per author,
etc.
• Complex metrics
– H index (and its many variations, mquotient, g-index
(corrects h-index for variations in citation patterns),
AR index, AW index
• Does not have any corrections for SELF CITATIONS

35. CIDS
• Measures output of authors for prestige and
influence
• Similar to PoP
• Corrects for Self-Citations

36. CIDS metrics
• Citations per year, h-index, g-index, total
citations, average cites per paper, self citations
included and excluded, etc.

37. Why use Bibliometric approach
• Considered empirical evidence of journal use
• Means of tracing the evolution of scholarship in a
topic/discipline

38. Disadvantages to Bibliometric
approach
• Prestigious, but small journals in a subspecialty may
not rank as highly in JCR and other metrics as
general publications
• “impact” vs. “quality”
• Editors tend to publish articles which cite their own
journal – increase self citation and their own ranking
• There are many reasons to cite a work, not all of
them good!

39. OTHER METRICS

40. Other Metrics
• Journal Acceptance Rates
– Cabell’s Directory of Publishing Opportunities
• Various disciplines
– Journal website (sometimes)
– Information from professional associations
– ASK YOUR SUBJECT BIBLIOGRAPHER

41. Other Metrics
• Ulrichsweb
– Comprehensive directory of published journals and
periodical literature
– Circulation stats, referee status, publisher, frequency
of publication, etc.
Library website->databases->search by name-> U
http://library.albany.edu

42. Other Metrics: The Future?
• Online “Clicks” or downloads
• MESUR

43. What does it all mean for
Tenure and Promotion?
• Choosing the right journal is a balancing act
• No one bibliometric indicator is the final word on
journal “quality”
• Reputation and bibliometrics in tandem can
paint a positive picture of your journal choice
• Bibliometrics can also be applied to an individual
scholar’s work

44. Final thought:
• The ranking or prestige of a journal is *not
necessarily* an indicator of the quality of an
individual article published in it.
• To judge the quality of an individual article, READ
THE ARTICLE

45. QUESTIONS?
Elaine M. Lasda Bergman
Social Welfare, Gerontology and Dewey Reference Bibliographer
Dewey Graduate Library
elasdabergman@albany.edu
442-3695