Science-metrix develops new journals classification system (and interactive webtool) using both the Web of Science (Thomson Reuters) and Scopus (Elsevier).

A new set of tools recently released (first public release: 2010-12-01 (v1.00)) by Science-Metrix Inc. seeks to improve the way we talk about and understand science. The US/Canada-based research evaluation firm has developed a new, multi-lingual (18 languages!) classification of scientific journals, which is accompanied by an interactive web tool.  The journal classification, which covers 15,000 peer-reviewed scientific journals, is translated by more than 22 international experts who volunteered their time and expertise, making the tools available to a worldwide audience.  The complete journals list is available for download as excel sheet.

The interactive ‘Scientific Journals Ontology Explorer’ allows users to visualise the links between 175 scientific specialties (subject categories) in 18 languages, from Arabic to Swedish.

The visualization contains 3 different views: a circular “Subfield Citation Wheel” (representing both citations as well as references), a “Field Citation Wheel” (showing the links between distinct scientific disciplines) and a network “Map of Science” (revealing similarities between disciplines by relative distance). The goal of this visualization is to show people how science spans a broad universe and how interlinked scientific research actually is.

How is the field of Business & Management covered in the journals list?

The field of  Economics & Business (as part of the domain Economic & Social Sciences) contains 822 journals (this is 5,4% of he total Science metrix list)  in 12 subfields, where Business & Management is included with 222 journals (27%):

Every journal is classified into only one category.

Subfields of ‘Economics & Business’	N	%
Accounting	32	3,9%
Agricultural Economics & Policy	27	3,3%
Business & Management	222	27,0%
Development Studies	42	5,1%
Econometrics	13	1,6%
Economic Theory	13	1,6%
Economics	244	29,7%
Finance	63	7,7%
Industrial Relations	21	2,6%
Logistics & Transportation	49	6,0%
Marketing	61	7,4%
Sport, Leisure & Tourism	35	4,3%
Total Journals	822	100%

I will compare these with our ERIM Journals list, the ISI quartiles and the SJR (scopus) quartiles scores to see how the list is structured in terms of quality layers.

(I wil add these details later this week.)

In the ontology browser, you can create a map of science and learn how the field of business and management is connected to other subject categories. I have selected the closest fields in the screenshot below.

About Science-Metrix:

Science-Metrix is the world’s largest independent firm dedicated to scientometrics, technometrics, and science and technology (S&T) evaluation. The firm’s core business involves supporting evidence-based decision-making with strong empirical data and sound theoretical approaches. This contract research organization combines qualitative and quantitative techniques to deliver high quality program evaluations, performance and outcome assessments, and evaluation frameworks. Every Science-Metrix report is produced by a team of dedicated high-calibre experts and relies on the world-class data found in the Scopus, Web of Science and Questel databases.

Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age

Here is a new book from NAP Committee on Ensuring the Utility and Integrity of Research Data in a Digital Age;

National Academy of Sciences

As digital technologies are expanding the power and reach of research, they are also
raising complex issues. These include complications in ensuring the validity of research
data; standards that do not keep pace with the high rate of innovation; restrictions on data
sharing that reduce the ability of researchers to verify results and build on previous
research; and huge increases in the amount of data being generated, creating severe
challenges in preserving that data for long-term use.
Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility,
and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age examines the consequences of the
changes affecting research data with respect to three issues – integrity, accessibility, and
stewardship-and finds a need for a new approach to the design and the management of
research projects. The report recommends that all researchers receive appropriate
training in the management of research data, and calls on researchers to make all
research data, methods, and other information underlying results publicly accessible in a
timely manner. The book also sees the stewardship of research data as a critical
long-term task for the research enterprise and its stakeholders. Individual researchers,
research institutions, research sponsors, professional societies, and journals involved in
scientific, engineering, and medical research will find this book an essential guide to the
principles affecting research data in the digital age.

Front Matter i-xvi
Summary 1-10 (skim)
1 Research Data in the Digital Age 11-32 (skim)
2 Ensuring the Integrity of Research Data 33-58 (skim)
3 Ensuring Access to Research Data 59-94 (skim)
4 Promoting the Stewardship of Research Data 95-114 (skim)
5 Defining Roles and Responsibilities 115-120 (skim)
Appendix A: Biographical Information on the Members of the Committee on Ensuring the Utility and Integrity of Research Data in a Digital Age 121-132 (skim)
Appendix B: Relevant National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council Reports 133-142 (skim)
Appendix C: Letters from Scientific Journals Requesting the Study 143-154 (skim)
Index 155-162 (skim)

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.

Authoratory: find an expert in any field

Authoratory is a unique database of contact information, professional interests, social connections and funding of thousands of leading scientists. The content of Authoratory is produced by a computer program analyzing large amounts of data from PubMed. PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 16 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950s. PubMed includes links to full text articles and other related resources.

Authoratory software data-mining techniques make it possible to discover new information about the authors – the information that is not apparent by reviewing one or two of their articles. For each selected author Authoratory gives the following:

• the author status: primary or non-primary (primary author publishes articles independently, while non-primary always publishes articles with another author or a group of authors)
• the list of most frequent coauthors (navigate the social network between the authors using their join publications)
• professional interests (as indicated by the MeSH keywords and by the statistical analysis of abstracts and publication titles)
• the author’s affiliated institution and contact information
• the change of all these parameters across time

Authoratory keyword search is unique as well. It uses keyword frequencies to rank authors against each other. The more papers the particular author publishes for a specific keyword, the higher his rank is in the keyword listings. With Authoratory keyword search it ‘s possible to quickly find all authors with expertise in a specific narrow topic.

HISTCITE™; Bibiliographic Analysis and Visualization Software

HistCite is a flexible software solution to aid researchers in visualizing the results of literature searches in the Web of Science. It is easy, fast, and provides perspectives and information not available from the Web of Science.

HistCite can create clear and informative data tables and graphs in an HTML format readable in a web browser. Go here see examples of HistCite output. HistCite also outputs data in tables and publication-quality graphs.

HistCite is a software implementation of algorithmic historiography, and has been developed by Dr Eugene Garfield, founder of the Institute for Scientific Information and the inventor of citation analysis. Go here for a bibliography of papers on algorithmic historiography.

HistCite software is scheduled for commercial release in early 2007. If you want to learn more about HistCite and to get information about when it becomes available, please use the feedback form.

Click here for a Flash demo of the main features of HistCite.

What Can I Do With HistCite?

HistCite has many applications. Here are some of them:

Identify the key literature in a research field
By analyzing the results of a keyword search you can identify:

• papers important to the development of the topic

• important papers “missed” by your keyword search

• most prolific and most cited authors and journals

• other keywords that can be used to expand the collection

Analyze publication productivity and citation rates within a collection of research papers
Compare characteristics such as:

• countries and institutions that authors publish from

• most prolific and most cited authors within the groups

• citation statistics for groups and subgroups (mean and median citation rates of papers, number of authors per paper, etc.)

Reconstruct the history and development of a research field
Analyze the content of an author search and you can find:

• highly cited articles

• important co-author relationships

• earlier publications and documents important to the development of the author’s work

• time line of the authors’ publications

• view historiographs showing the key papers and timeline of a research field.