Bibliometric assessment of national scientific journals

USA vs Russia in the scientific arena

This work contrasts the scientific standing of the USA and Russia in 146 scientific disciplines. We consider four dimensions of competitive positioning: the contribution to global scientific advancement, the researchers' productivity, the scientific specialization indexes, and the efficiency in resource allocation across disciplines. Differently from previous literature, we use discipline-normalized output to input indicators, thus avoiding distortions due to different intensities of publication across disciplines. Results show that the USA outperforms Russia in contribution to world scholarly impact in all but four disciplines, and is more productive in all but two disciplines. The USA is less efficient in allocating resources to the disciplines where it performs better, probably due to its higher research diversification.

Inconsistent quality signals: evidence from the regional journals

Nowadays many countries and institutions use bibliometric assessment of journal quality in their research evaluation policies. However, bibliometric measures, such as impact factor or quartile, may provide a biased quality assessment for relatively new, regional, or non-mainstream journals, as these outlets usually do not possess a longstanding history, and may not be included into indexing databases. To reduce the information asymmetry between academic community (researchers, editors, policymakers) and journal management, we propose an alternative approach to evaluate journals quality signals using previous publication track record of authors. We explore the difference in the quality signals sent by regional journals. Traditional, journal-level, bibliometric measures are contrasted with generalised measures of authors' publishing records. We used a set of 50,477 articles and reviews in 83 regional journals in Physics and Astronomy (2014-2019) to extract and process data on 73 866 authors and their additional 329,245 publications in other Scopus-indexed journals. We found that traditional journal-level measures (such as journal quartile, CiteScore percentile, Scimago Journal Rank) tend to under-evaluate journal quality, thus contributing to an image of low-quality research venues. Author-level measures (including the share of papers in the Nature Index journals) send positive signals of journal quality and allow us to subdivide regional journals by their publishing strategies. These results suggest that research evaluation policies might consider attributing greater weight to regional journals, not only for the training purposes of doctoral students but also for gaining international visibility and impact.