An indicator of the impact of journals based on the percentage of their highly cited publications
| Date | 12 June 2017 |
| Pages | 398-411 |
| Published date | 12 June 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-01-2016-0008 |
| Author | Sara M. González-Betancor,Pablo Dorta-González |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Bibliometrics,Databases,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet,Records management & preservation,Document management |
An indicator of the impact of
journals based on the percentage
of their highly cited publications
Sara M. González-Betancor and Pablo Dorta-González
Metodos Cuantitativos en Economia y Gestion,
University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Las Palmas, Spain
Abstract
Purpose –The two most used citation impact indicators in the assessment of scientific journals are,
nowadays, the impact factor and the h-index. However, both indicators are not field normalized (vary heavily
depending on the scientific category). Furthermore, the impact factor is not robust to the presence of articles
with a large number of citations, while the h-index depends on the journal size. These limitations are very
important when comparing journals of different sizes and categories. The purpose of this paper is to propose
an alternative citation impact indicator, based on the percentage of highly cited articles in the journal.
Design/methodology/approach –This alternative indicator is empirically compared with the impact
factor and the h-index, considering different time windows and citation percentiles (levels of citation for
considering an article as highly cited compared to others in the same year and category). The authors use four
journal categories (Clarivate Analytics Web of Science) which are quite different according to the publication
profiles and citation levels (Information Science & Library Science,Operations Research & Management
Science,Ophthalmology, and Physics Condensed Matter).
Findings –After analyzing 20 different indicators, depending on the citation percentile and the time window
in which citations are counted, the indicator that seems to best homogenize the categories is the one that
considers a time window of two years and a citation level of 10 percent.
Originality/value –The percentage of highly cited articles in a journal is field normalized (comparable
between scientific categories), independent of the journal size and also robust to the presence of articles with
a high number of citations.
Keywords Citation analysis, H-index, Impact factor, Citation impact indicator, Journal assessment,
Percentage of highly cited articles
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Scientific communication is currently developed by means of the internet. There are a
growing number of scientific journals that either publish scientific articles in open access or
at least allow access to the article through the subscription mode. Thus, researchers and
people, in general, are in need of tools that help them discriminate the relevance and quality
of content in scientific journals. In this regard, the present study proposes a suitable tool to
achieve this goal, which can be added to other well-known indexes.
To evaluate the quality of a research –in comparison to other research –is one of the
purposes of research assessment. As quality is subjective and difficult to measure, citations
are used as a proxy. Citations play an important role in scholarly communication and are a
significant component in research evaluation. The assumption is that highly cited work has
influenced the work of many other researchers and hence it is more valuable.
At present two families of citation impact indicators for scientific journals are often used.
The first being the journal impact indices, which consider an average of citations per publication
for a given census and citation time window (Garfield, 1972). This family includes, among
others, the journal impact factors (for two and five years) of database Journal Citation Reports
( JCR) owned by Clarivate Analytics (Bensman, 2007; Bergstrom, 2007; Moed et al., 2012),
the maximum impact factor (Dorta-González and Dorta-González, 2013c), and the SJR impact
indexes (González-Pereira et al., 2009) of the Scopus database owned by Elsevier.
Online Information Review
Vol. 41 No. 3, 2017
pp. 398-411
© Emerald PublishingLimited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-01-2016-0008
Received 11 January 2016
Revised 19 December 2016
Accepted 31 March 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
398
OIR
41,3
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