Informetric analysis of the international impact of scientific journals: how “international” are the international journals?

Abstract

By developing a methodology for on‐line citation analysis, the international characteristics of scientific journals have been analysed on the basis of correlations between the geographical distribution patterns of authors, citations and subscriptions. The study covered seven selected LIS journals. Assuming that the numbers of authors and citations in each geographical region follow the Poisson distribution, the hypothesis was tested, that the intensities are proportional to the subscriptions. In most cases the correlation between authors and citations was so positive that the international visibility and impact of the scientific journals can be defined by these two variables. As regards the distribution pattern of subscribers, authors and citations, however, the test showed very weak or no correlations. The analysis of the statistical significance of differences gave some useful data, the importance of which to marketing and publishing strategies is obvious. The paper suggests examining also the knowledge export of journals as an additional criterion for the evaluation of their impact, and the quality of research published in them. The comparison of Journal Impact Factors (JIF) is another contribution of this study, aimed to enhance the use of impact factor analysis with various time intervals. We demonstrate new and flexible ways of using the JIF for diachronous and synchronous analyses. The study brings new dimensions to the discussions of the impact, status and image of scientific journals. It focuses on the utilisation of informetric analysis to go beyond the simplistic use of the JIF and to get a deeper understanding of the “real” impact of international scientific journals and their market.

The iceberg hypothesis revisited

“…-Knowledge Export Ratio (%) (Wormell 1998) In the definitions of these indices, it has to be borne in mind that, since many journals are assigned to more than one specific subject area, the references from one such journal to any of these specific subject areas are Subcitations.…”

Bibliometric characteristics of the journal Science: Pre-Koshland, Koshland and post-Koshland period

“…Every journal has its author group, described by country/territory and institutional distribution, gender classification, productive authors, and so on [WORMELL, 1998]. Here we compare the country/territory as well as the institutional distribution of Science's authors in the pre-K, K and post-K periods.…”

A user‐oriented interface for generalised informetric analysis based on applying advanced data modelling techniques

“…We have also defined online dialogs for standard recognized contribution analysis for these cases (bypassed here). In a very similar way one may compute the scientific export and the geographical knowledge export to other fields [4,32]. The scientific export is calculated as follows: • by selecting top journals in some area and finding all the source articles in these journals;…”

“…Hjortgaard Christensen and Ingwersen [7] demonstrate how various citation analyses of journals may be performed online, by using the Dialog retrieval system, for one or more volumes of a specific journal. The following remarks can be made concerning the state-ofthe-art methodology presented recently by Wormell [32]:…”