Another new Citation Impact tool on Scopus data: Scimago

Declan Butler, Free journal-ranking tool enters citation market, Nature News, January 2, 2008. Excerpt:

A new [OA] Internet database lets users generate on-the-fly citation statistics of published research papers for free. The tool also calculates papers’ impact factors using a new algorithm similar to PageRank, the algorithm Google uses to rank web pages. The open-access database is collaborating with Elsevier, the giant Amsterdam-based science publisher, and its underlying data come from Scopus, a subscription abstracts database created by Elsevier in 2004.

The SCImago Journal & Country Rank database was launched in December by SCImago,

Thomson is also under fire from researchers who want greater transparency over how citation metrics are calculated and the data sets used. In a hard-hitting editorial published in Journal of Cell Biology in December, Mike Rossner, head of Rockefeller University Press, and colleagues say their analyses of databases supplied by Thomson yielded different values for metrics from those published by the company (M. Rossner et al . J. Cell Biol. 179, 1091–1092 ; 2007). Thomson, they claim, was unable to supply data to support its published impact factors. “Just as scientists would not accept the findings in a scientific paper without seeing the primary data,” states the editorial, “so should they not rely on Thomson Scientific’s impact factor, which is based on hidden data.”

It also includes a new metric: the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR).

The familiar impact factor created by industry leader Thomson Scientific, based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is calculated as the average number of citations by the papers that each journal contains. The SJR also analyses the citation links between journals in a series of iterative cycles, in the same way as the Google PageRank algorithm. This means not all citations are considered equal; those coming from journals with higher SJRs are given more weight. The main difference between SJR and Google’s PageRank is that SJR uses a citation window of three years. See Table 1

I tested some testing on the marketing research subfield of business and management (see screenshot). I ranked the list according to total cites over the last 3 years.

SJR versus JCR:

Let’s take the highest ranked journal form Scimago: Journal of Marketing (sjr 0,107) and compare it with the JCR citation trend. JOM has the higest impactfactor i the ISI subjectcategory Business for 2006. So in general this would mean that the best journals come up equally. But it remains a situation of comparing apples and oranges because the subject categories differ between Scopus and ISI. So the relative position of a journal is different in the two measure systems.

Annual Dutch citation-topparade (2000-2004) and tipparade (2004) for economists; not the complete picture

The ESB journal has published it’s list of top economists (esb-economentop_20070405.pdf) again this week. The topparade measures the citation in the Web of science in the period 2000-2004 for articles published in the period 1988-2004. This is a moving time window. The six ‘big’ economics faculties in the Netherlands (EUR, RUG, UM, UvA, UvT, VU) each submit 20 of their best researchers to the ranking, while the relatively smaller institutes (UU, WUR, DNB, TUD) select each 5 names. The ranking does not cover all of he faculties in the Netherlands, because some choose not to participate and the faculties of management sometimes do not participate. Still the ranking gives an indication of where the best academic research in the Netherlands is done. The ranking also gives an overview of the institutions where the best economists are affiliated. I’m proud to mention that Erasmus University Rotterdam has jumped Tilburg University to the first place in the institutions list this year.

The citation chain: Eigenfactor maps the researchers citation trail and the amount of time he spends at each citation along the track.

Another way of mapping and ranking is developed, which ranks journals much as Google ranks websites; the Eigenfactor. This new concept and facility is developed as part of a non-commercial academic research project sponsored by the Bergstrom lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. They aim to develop novel methods for evaluating the influence of scholarly periodicals and for mapping the structure of academic research. The Eigenfactor score of a journal is an estimate of the percentage of time that library users spend with that journal. The Eigenfactor algorithm corresponds to a simple model of research in which readers follow chains of citations as they move from journal to journal. Imagine that a researcher goes to the library and selects a journal article at random. After reading the article, the researcher selects at random one of the citations from the article. She then proceeds to the journal that was cited, reads a random article there, and selects a citation to direct her to her next journal volume. The researcher does this ad infinitum. The amount of time that the researcher spends with each journal gives us a measure of that journal’s importance within network of academic citations. The amount of time that a researcher spends with each journal gives an estimate of the amount of time that real researchers spend with each journal. The developers of this new concept use mathematics to simulate this process.

Just to try I searched the Business category in the search option of this facility. As a result of this a list of 717 journals was presented. For all the journals the article influence was listed. The following screenshot gives an overview of the result:

Reflections on Google Scholar and Hirsch index

Anne Will Harzing reflects on these citation developments form the perspective of the business and management field. She matches these sources with the Publish or Perish software. This website is one of the soources very relevant to stay in touch with. Two new white papers were added: Reflections on Google Scholar and Reflectionson the h-index. These papers discuss the validity, assumptions, and limitationsof the underlying sources and methods used by Publish or Perish.

[http://www.harzing.com/pop_gs.htm]
[http://www.harzing.com/pop_hindex.htm]
[http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm]

Competitors for the Web of Science?

Dana L. Roth has published an overview of the current alternatives. Services currently offering cited reference searching include (and I give the complete list to have a good look at it):

1. Chemical Abstracts/SciFinder/SciFinder Scholar
2. NASA Astrophysics Data System Abstract Service
3. Amazon.com’s ‘Search Inside this Book’ program
4. Scopus
5. Scitation/Spin Web
6. PROLA (Physical Review Online Archive)
7. Citation Bridge (US Patents)
8. US Patent and Trademark Office
9. Google Scholar
10. Optics InfoBase
11. CiteSeer
12. Science Direct
13. PsycINFO
14. IEEE Xplore
15. Spires HEP
16. IOP (Institute of Physics)
17. CrossRef

She concludes her overview:

… Recent developments of ‘competitors’ to the WoS, while interesting and useful for quick links to some citing references, are clearly not a substitute for a comprehensive citation search. WoS currently indexes ~ 8000 journals from the sciences, engineering, social sciences and the humanities, and clearly remains the primary resource for citation searching….

Source: Dana L. Roth,The emergence of competitors to the Science CitationIndex and the Web of Science (pdf 6pp), Current Science Online, Vol. 89,No. 9, 10 November 2005,[http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/nov102005/1531.pdf]

Short impact (JCR) and long impact (JPI) of journals

We are updating the ERIM journalslist at the moment and as part of this procedure we are evaluating different measures of status and prestige of journals. The ERIM list is our main vehicle for focus and quality-policy in our filed of Research in Management at Erasmus University. We update this list every two year.

One of the issues is ofcourse the period we take into account when we look at the journal performance. We can use the JCR reports with the impact factors of ISI. This gives an inpression of the last two years. We could also take a longer time horizon for our classifications of journals. The following example takes a five year and a 20+ year perspective on the performance of journals for the subject category of Business. See how the long term quality journals perform here. It helps me to develop a more balanced view on impact and prestige of journals. If only those data were all free available on the web…
source: http://www.in-cites.com/research/2003/july_28_2003-1.html

Journals Ranked by Impact: Business

Rank	2002 Impact Factor	Impact 1998-2002	Impact 1981-2002
1	Acad. Management Rev. (3.70)	Acad. Management Rev. (10.24)	Admin. Science Quart. (51.85)
2	Strategic Mgmt. J. (3.09)	Admin. Science Quart. (8.42)	Acad. Management Rev. (39.91)
3	Sloan Management Rev. (3.04)	Journal of Marketing (5.73)	Journal of Marketing (33.34)
4	Admin. Science Quart. (2.63)	Strategic Mgmt. J. (5.55)	J. Consumer Research (30.76)
5	Acad. Management J. (2.54)	California Mgmt. Rev. (5.46)	Acad. Management J. (30.18)
6	J. Consumer Research (2.31)	Acad. Management J. (5.44)	Strategic Mgmt. J. (25.76)
7	Journal of Marketing (2.29)	J. Consumer Research (4.63)	J. Marketing Research (23.91)
8	Harvard Business Rev. (2.03)	J. Acad. Market. Sci. (4.53)	Journal of Business (16.07)
9	Marketing Science (1.94)	Sloan Management Rev. (4.36)	Journal of Management (15.19)
10	J. Acad. Market. Sci. (1.93)	J. Marketing Research (3.87)	Marketing Science (12.48)

And the same exercise for the subject category Business Finance:

source: http://www.in-cites.com/research/2004/july_19_2004-1.html

Journals Ranked by Impact: Business, Finance

Rank	2003 Impact Factor	Impact 1999-2003	Impact 1981-2003
1	J. Account./Economics (3.84)	Journal of Finance (6.85)	J. Financial Economics (34.68)
2	Journal of Finance (3.27)	J. Financial Economics (5.60)	Journal of Finance (21.93)
3	J. Financial Economics (2.72)	IMF Staff Papers (4.87)	J. Monetary Economics (20.39)
4	Rev. Financial Studies (2.20)	J. Account./Economics (4.24)	J. Account./Economics (15.32)
5	J. Accounting Research (1.52)	Rev. Financial Studies (4.12)	Rev. Financial Studies (14.82)
6	Accounting Review (1.45)	J. Accounting Research (3.16)	J. Finan. Quant. Analys. (9.37)
7	J. Industrial Econ. (1.33)	Mathematical Finance (2.90)	J. Risk & Uncertainty (9.22)
8	World Bank Econ. Rev. (1.27)	World Bank Econ. Rev. (2.83)	Journal of Accounting (8.98)
9	Financial Mgmt. (1.21)	J. Monetary Economics (2.72)	J. Industrial Econ. (8.81)
10	J. Monetary Economics (1.15)	J. Risk & Uncertainty (2.61)	J. Money Credit & Banking (7.80)

Peer review in the internet age: 5 alternatives

Gerry McKiernan Presents 5 alternative models for the classical peer review system:

1. Open Peer Review (let authors know the identity of reviewers)
2. Commentary-Based review (two-stage procedure where the first review phase is open)
3. Community Based review (all submisions accepted with minimal review in a standard tier and only a few with full peer review in the upper tier)
4. Usage-based review (a metric that uses access statistics as an indicator of significance)
5. Citation-based (Citebase & Web Citation Index)

The article ends with the following lines;

As observed by Harnad, “the Net …[not only] offers the possibility of implementing peer review more efficiently and equitably …,” but more significantly, provides a “real revolutionary dimension” with such features as “open peer commentary on published and ongoing work.” In addition, the Net provides “room … for unrefereed discussion too, [notably] in high-level discussion forums ….” Such enhancements to conventional peer review need not, however, be limited to features that some may view as simple extensions of the traditional model. In addition to ‘ideal’ conversations, metrics such as access statistics, as well as citing and linking, can also offer impartial indicators of valid and significant scholarship in all its forms, at any and all stages.

Open Access, downloads (‘hits’) & citation impact: a bibliography

The Open Citation Project (Opcit) maintains a bibliography on the effects of downloads on citation impacts. The general assumption is that papers which are distributed in open archives before final publishing as articles in journals, have a positive effect on the amount of citations (Times Cited) for the final article when published in a journal. This bibliography is very useful because it puts together the most relevant and new papers and reports on the topic. I have put a a spy on that site to make sure I stay in touch with this bibiography.