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Origins of Measures of Journal Impact: Historical Contingencies and Their Consequences on Current Use1
Abstract
This paper examines the genesis of journal impact measures and how their evolution culminated in the journal impact factor (JIF) produced by the Institute for Scientific Information. The paper shows how the form of the JIF, which is the result of historically contingent choices rather than a carefully chosen and tested set of features, affected its subsequent use, misuse, and manipulation by researchers, journal editors, and bibliometricians.
... The genesis of scientometric research, which relies on the use of quantitative methods for analyzing scientific communication, can be traced back to the 1960s (Garfield 1979). Though it was originally used by librarians facing limited shelf space and an ever-widening pool of scientific literature, for the purposes of identifying which reference materials should take priority (Archambault and Lariviere 2007), it has gradually developed into a discipline in its own right. ...
As the discipline of Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS) has continued to expand rapidly over the past twenty years, scientometric research has been increasingly applied to analyze its trends and patterns. Drawing inspiration from Social Network Analysis, this study aims to quantify academic research impact and identify patterns of influence at an institutional and regional level in Chinese Interpreting Studies (CIS), by seeking answers to the following questions: Which are the most influential publications? Which institutions and regions carry the most weight? How have their respective levels of influence evolved over time? By analyzing a near-exhaustive corpus of 59,303 citations from CIS literature, the study reveals that most of the influential publications are monographs and theoretical in nature, though many Chinese textbooks on interpreting are also highly influential. It also finds that an institution's ranking in research productivity does not necessarily translate into high academic influence, and geographical proximity does not determine whether neighboring regions belong to the same research community.
... Porém, nesta mesma publicação Garfield menciona a ideia de um fator de impacto de periódicos, tema já tratado anteriormente por outros autores, conforme afirmam Archambault & Larivière (2007). ...
... After counting the citations appearing in the most recent volume of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, they ranked the journals according to the frequency of these citations. In the following years, their method became quite popular among library managers, who used it as a tool for journal selection in many subject fields (Brodman 1944), with one fundamental modification: the use of more journals, representing many countries and languages, as the base for the calculation (Archambault and Lariviere 2007). ...
The purpose of this study was to examine the impact factor of cognitive psychology journals indexed in the Science and Social Sciences edition ofJournal Citation Reports(JCR) database over a period of
10 consecutive years. Cognitive psychology journals were indexed in 11 different subject categories of the database. Their mean impact factor ranged from 1.580 to 2.526. In relation to the subject
categories of the Social Sciences edition, cognitive psychology journals were placed between the fourth and the sixth position for the years 2007–2009. Lower positions were observed in relation to the categories in the Science edition. Calculation of the intraclass correlation coefficient showed that cognitive psychology journals were relatively stable in the examined period.
... Among others, the inclusion of journal self-citations, the asymmetry between the numerator and the denominator, the skewness of the distribution of citations received by papers published in a given journal and the use of a two-year citation window. For a review of impact factors' limits, see Archambault and Larivière (2007). Given these limits, this paper does not use the impact factor of a journal as a measure of the average impact of the papers it publishes, but rather as a proxy for the "relative international eminence of journals", the latter being closely correlated to impact factors (Vinkler, 2004). ...
Previous research on university-industry collaboration in Canada, using mean impact factors as a proxy, concluded that the
scientific impact of such research is not inferior to that of university research. Using field-normalized impact factors and
citation counts, this paper re-examines the Canadian case. It shows that, when impact factors are field-normalized, university-industry
papers are published, on average, in journals with lower impact factors than papers originating from universities only. However,
field-normalized citation values reveal the opposite: the average scientific impact of university-industry papers is significantly
above that of both university-only papers and industry-only papers. Collaboration with industries is, thus, far from detrimental
to the scientific impact of university research and even increases it significantly.
As the discipline of Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS) has continued to expand rapidly over the past twenty years, scientometric research has been applied increasingly often to analyse its trends and patterns. Drawing inspiration from Social Network Analysis (SNA), this study aims to quantify academic research impact and identify patterns of influence at an institutional level in Chinese Interpreting Studies (CIS), by seeking answers to the following questions: Which are the most influential publications? Which institutions carry the most weight? How have their respective levels of influence evolved over time? By analysing a near-exhaustive corpus of 59,303 citations from CIS literature, the study reveals that the majority of influential publications are monographs and theoretical in nature, though many Chinese textbooks on interpreting are also highly influential. It also finds that an institution's ranking in research productivity does not necessarily translate into high academic influence.
The bibliographic references may reveal how science is being published, and thus provide important information regarding the history of any magazine. When identifying the impact of different types of documents cited by five scientific journals of different fields, it was found that the book has considerably been more quoted in a particular magazine of Applied Social Sciences; meanwhile, the Public Health field makes use of this type of document about as much as it does with scientific articles. In journals of Physics and Medicine, citations from international journals are much more prevalent. As for journals in the field of Veterinary and Information Science, proceedings and dissertations stand out. These findings are important to understand how the scientific publication of different fields work. And that could also be observed when analyzing both the ratings of the journals in Qualis, and the criteria of existing field documents. Bibliometric indicators that are not restricted to an index are able to provide parameters to cooperate in establishing criteria for the assessment of scientific production in Brazil, according to the characteristics of different fields of knowledge.
In the first part of this study we analysed the temporal stability of Garfield's Impact Factor (IF) over the last decade (2001-2010). The analyses were performed for two Web of Science (WoS) categories of the JCR Science Edition ("Polymer Science" and "Nanoscience & Nano-technology") and two of the Social Sciences Edition ("Political Science" and "Information Science & Library Science") at journal category level. Furthermore, we tried to identify the most characteristic patterns of IF timelines at journal level and analysed the reasons for strong IF fluctuations. Additionally, we checked if alternative journal impact measures like the Article Influence Score, SJR or SNIP are as sensitive to short-term fluctuations in the citation frequencies as Garfield's Impact Factor. In the second part, we explored if one often mentioned weakness of the IF, its short citation window, can be used to identify hot papers, i.e. papers that are cited clearly above-average in the first two years after publication, by means of IF fluctuations. By analysing the citation distributions at article level we show that abrupt and large short-term variations of the IF can, in principle, offer a very simple and intuitive method to identify "unexpected" hot papers and hot topics at journal level. Background and introduction Apart from simplicity one of the key strengths of Garfield's impact factor (IF) is its assumed relative temporal stability (Glanzel & Moed, 2002, 174). However, as exemplified by the journal "Acta Crystallographica A" there might at least be a few exceptions. The impact factor of this journal increased from approximately 2 to 50 and beyond within only 2 years simply because of one single extremely highly-cited paper. This paper also provoked considerable changes in other bibliometric indicators that are based on arithmetic means like the crown indicator.
Graduate students are an important part of the academic workforce. However, little is known on their overall contribution to science. Using the participation in Web of Science indexed peer-reviewed publications of the complete population of doctoral students in Quebec over the 2000-2007 period (N=27,393), this thesis achieves three main contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of information science, sociology of the scientific community and sociology of higher education. The first contribution is a technical one and involves the creation of an algorithm that allows the automatic attribution of a large proportion of individual researchers' papers. Indeed, using the patterns found in Quebec university researchers' use of keywords, cited references and discipline of publication, the algorithm automatically attributes or rejects at least one scientific paper to 88% of doctoral students. The second contribution is to provide a large-scale analysis of doctoral students' socialization to research, using the percentage of doctoral students who have published at least one paper during their program as an indicator. It shows that this integration varies greatly among disciplines, with students in the natural and medical sciences being more integrated into research than their colleagues of the social sciences and humanities. Collaboration is an important component of this socialization: disciplines in which student-faculty collaboration are higher are also those in which doctoral students are the most integrated into research. Access to research funds also influences doctoral students participation in peer-reviewed papers, as specialties where professors receive greater research funds are also those where students are the most likely to publish. Although the papers to which doctoral students contribute are most often written in collaboration, they are less likely to be the result of international collaboration. Such socialization to research is also positively linked with students' degree completion and the likelihood of a subsequent career in research. Finally, the third contribution of this thesis is to measure the percentage of the research output of the research system produced by doctoral students. It provides evidence that, for all disciplines combined, PhD students account for 33% of the publication output of the province, a percentage that is considerably higher than that of Quebec hospital researchers taken together and more than 5 times higher than that of federal and industrial researchers of the province. In terms of scientific impact, papers to which doctoral students have contributed obtain significantly lower citation rates than other Quebec papers to which they have not contributed, although the average impact factor of the journals in which they publish is significantly higher. This suggests that the scientific impact of doctoral students' papers may suffer from a Matthew Effect, the sociological phenomenon observed by which recognition for discoveries is more easily attributed to well known scientists than to others less known. Overall, this interdisciplinary thesis provides a significant insight into the extent, the context and the effect of socialization to research in the PhD curriculum, as well as a better understanding of the importance of doctoral students' scientific contributions within Quebec's research system. These findings should be of great interest to university administrators as well as for research councils and the science policy community in general. Les étudiants gradués comptent pour une part importante de la main d'uvre académique. Toutefois, nous ne savons que très peu de choses sur leur contribution globale à l'avancement des connaissances. À partir des articles publiés dans des revues à comités de pairs et indexés dans le Web of Science par la population complète des étudiants au doctorat au Québec entre et 2000 et 2007 (N=27,393), cette thèse effectue trois contributions principales à l'avancement des connaissances en sciences de l'information et en sociologie de la communauté scientifique et de l'enseignement supérieur. La première contribution est de nature technique et consiste en la création d'un algorithme qui permet l'attribution automatique à un chercheur d'un pourcentage important de ses articles scientifiques. En effet, en utilisant les régularités trouvées dans les mots-clés, références citées et la discipline de publication des chercheurs universitaires québécois, cet algorithme permet l'attribution ou le rejet automatique d'au moins un article à 88% des étudiants de doctorat. La seconde contribution est l'analyse à grande échelle de la socialisation des doctorants à la recherche, en utilisant comme indicateur le pourcentage d'étudiants au doctorat qui ont publié au moins un papier au cours de leur programme. Les données montrent que cette intégration varie considérablement entre les disciplines : les étudiants des sciences naturelles et médicales étant plus intégrés à la recherche que leurs collègues des sciences sociales et humaines. La collaboration est un élément important de cette socialisation: les disciplines dans lesquelles la collaboration doctorant-professeur est la plus élevée étant celles où les doctorants sont les plus intégrés dans la recherche. L'accès à des fonds de recherche influence également la participation des étudiants à des publications; les spécialités où les professeurs reçoivent davantage de fonds étant également celles où les étudiants sont plus susceptibles de publier. Bien que les documents auxquels ont contribués les doctorants soient pratiquement tous écrits en collaboration, ils sont moins souvent le résultat d'une collaboration internationale. Cette socialisation à la recherche est également liée de façon positive avec l'obtention du diplôme et la poursuite d'une carrière en recherche. Enfin, la troisième contribution de cette thèse est la mesure de l'importance, dans l'ensemble de la recherche québécoise, des résultats de recherche auxquels des étudiants de doctorat ont contribué. On y constate que, toutes disciplines confondues, les doctorants ont participé à 33% de la production scientifique de la province, un pourcentage considérablement plus élevé que celui des chercheurs en milieu hospitalier de la province combinés et plus de 5 fois supérieur à celui des chercheurs du gouvernement fédéral et du secteur industriel. En termes d'impact scientifique, les articles auxquels les doctorants ont contribué obtiennent un nombre moyen de citations significativement plus faible celui des autres papiers québécois auxquels ils n'ont pas contribué, même si le facteur d'impact moyen de revues dans lesquelles ils publient est, au contraire, significativement plus élevé. Cela suggère que les articles des doctorants souffrent de l'effet St-Matthieu, phénomène selon lequel la paternité d'une découverte sera plus aisément attribuée à un chercheur reconnu qu'à un autre l'étant moins. Dans l'ensemble, cette thèse interdisciplinaire fournit une mesure unique de la prévalence, du contexte et de l'effet de la socialisation à la recherche dans les programmes de doctorat ainsi qu'une une meilleure compréhension de l'importance des doctorants au sein de la communauté scientifique québécoise. Ces résultats devraient être d'un grand intérêt pour les administrateurs d'université, les conseils subventionnaires ainsi que les chercheurs dans le domaine des politiques scientifiques.
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