Can scientific journals be classified in terms of aggregated journal‐journal citation relations using the Journal Citation Reports?

Abstract

The aggregated citation relations among journals included in the Science Citation Index provide us with a huge matrix which can be analyzed in various ways. Using principal component analysis or factor analysis, the factor scores can be used as indicators of the position of the cited journals in the citing dimensions of the database. Unrotated factor scores are exact, and the extraction of principal components can be made stepwise since the principal components are independent. Rotation may be needed for the designation, but in the rotated solution a model is assumed. This assumption can be legitimated on pragmatic or theoretical grounds. Since the resulting outcomes remain sensitive to the assumptions in the model, an unambiguous classification is no longer possible in this case.However, the factor-analytic solutions allow us to test classifications against the structures contained in the database. This will be demonstrated for the delineation of a set of biochemistry journals.

The study of subject-classification based on journal coupling and expert subject-classification system

“…In previous studies, clustering methods used in subject-classification analysis can be divided into three categories, methods grounded on multivariate statistics, such as principal component analysis (or factor analysis) (Leydesdorff and Cozzen 1993;White and McCain 1998;Leydesdorff 2006). Methods using the classical clustering analysis, for instance, hierarchical clustering (Zhang et al 2010(Zhang et al , 2012Braam et al 1991;Kronegger et al 2013;Ahlgren and Colliander 2009), minimum spanning tree (Chang and Chen 2011), etc.…”

The behaviors of multi-institute scientific organizations in nanotechnology

“…SCs have been widely used to represent disciplines, for example in the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative, although they are not without criticism concerning the evolving of SCs and assignment of publications to multiple SCs [35,46].…”

Visualization and analysis of SCImago Journal & Country Rank structure via journal clustering

“…Among the diverse statistical and bibliometric techniques used for classification and visualization analysis we have factor analysis (Leydesdorff, 2006;Vargas-Quesada et al, 2008), reference analysis (Glänzel and Schubert, 2003;Archambault et al, 2011;Gómez-Núñez et al, 2011) and clustering. The latter has become very popular in studies of subject groups within citation or text networks.…”