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Statistical modelling of citation exchange between statistics journals.

ABSTRACT: Rankings of scholarly journals based on citation data are often met with scepticism by the scientific community. Part of the scepticism is due to disparity between the common perception of journals' prestige and their ranking based on citation counts. A more serious concern is the inappropriate use of journal rankings to evaluate the scientific influence of researchers. The paper focuses on analysis of the table of cross-citations among a selection of statistics journals. Data are collected from the Web of Science database published by Thomson Reuters. Our results suggest that modelling the exchange of citations between journals is useful to highlight the most prestigious journals, but also that journal citation data are characterized by considerable heterogeneity, which needs to be properly summarized. Inferential conclusions require care to avoid potential overinterpretation of insignificant differences between journal ratings. Comparison with published ratings of institutions from the UK's research assessment exercise shows strong correlation at aggregate level between assessed research quality and journal citation 'export scores' within the discipline of statistics.

SUBMITTER: Varin C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4755202 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:PURPOSE: The research assesses the impact of online journals on citation patterns by examining whether researchers were more likely to limit the resources they cited to those journals available online rather than those only in print. SETTING: Publications from a large urban university with a medical college at an urban location and at a smaller regional location were examined. The number of online journals available to authors on either campus was the same. The number of print journals available on the large campus was much greater than the print journals available at the small campus. METHODOLOGY: Searches by author affiliation from 1996 to 2005 were performed in the Web of Science to find all articles written by affiliated members in the college of medicine at the selected institution. Cited references from randomly selected articles were recorded, and the cited journals were coded into five categories based on their availability at the study institution: print only, print and online, online only, not owned, and dropped. Results were analyzed using SPSS. The age of articles cited for selected years as well as for 2006 and 2007 was also examined. RESULTS: The number of journals cited each year continued to increase. On the large urban campus, researchers were not more likely to cite journals available online or less likely to cite journals only in print. At the regional location, at which the number of print-only journals was minimal, use of print-only journals significantly decreased. CONCLUSION/DISCUSSION: The citation of print-only journals by researchers with access to a library with a large print and electronic collection appeared to continue, despite the availability of potential alternatives in the online collection. Journals available in electronic format were cited more frequently in publications from the campus whose library had a small print collection, and the citation of journals available in both print and electronic formats generally increased over the years studied.

Project description:Bibliometric indicators increasingly affect careers, funding, and reputation of individuals, their institutions and journals themselves. In contrast to author self-citations, little is known about kinetics of journal self-citations. Here we hypothesized that they may show a generalizable pattern within particular research fields or across multiple fields. We thus analyzed self-cites to 60 journals from three research fields (multidisciplinary sciences, parasitology, and information science). We also hypothesized that the kinetics of journal self-citations and citations received from other journals of the same publisher may differ from foreign citations. We analyzed the journals published the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Nature Publishing Group, and Editura Academiei Române. We found that although the kinetics of journal self-cites is generally faster compared to foreign cites, it shows some field-specific characteristics. Particularly in information science journals, the initial increase in a share of journal self-citations during post-publication year 0 was completely absent. Self-promoting journal self-citations of top-tier journals have rather indirect but negligible direct effects on bibliometric indicators, affecting just the immediacy index and marginally increasing the impact factor itself as long as the affected journals are well established in their fields. In contrast, other forms of journal self-citations and citation stacking may severely affect the impact factor, or other citation-based indices. We identified here a network consisting of three Romanian physics journals Proceedings of the Romanian Academy, Series A, Romanian Journal of Physics, and Romanian Reports in Physics, which displayed low to moderate ratio of journal self-citations, but which multiplied recently their impact factors, and were mutually responsible for 55.9%, 64.7% and 63.3% of citations within the impact factor calculation window to the three journals, respectively. They did not receive nearly any network self-cites prior impact factor calculation window, and their network self-cites decreased sharply after the impact factor calculation window. Journal self-citations and citation stacking requires increased attention and elimination from citation indices.

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Statistical modelling of citation exchange between statistics journals.

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