Measuring the excellence contribution at the journal level: an alternative to Garfield’s impact factor

Is journal prestige indicator equivalent of money for humans?

In this paper, we investigate the time evolution of the rank correlation coefficients of the prestige indicators of the journals (such as Scimago Journal Rank) over 21 years, for 9856 journals in various disciplines. The observed dependencies do not differ qualitatively from those observed for the time evolution of the ranking correlations in wealth rheology among the richest people recently found by Burda et al. [Entropy 23, 842 (2021)], but quantitatively the changes in rank correlations for human wealth are much stronger than in the coefficients measuring the prestige of journals. In terms of Kendall's rank correlation coefficients, disciplines "Agricultural and Biological Sciences" and "Earth and Planetary Science" are the most typical, meaning that the time evolution of their rank correlation coefficient based on Scimago Journal Rank is closest to the time evolution of an average over all disciplines. The time evolution of the mean value of the overlap ratio is closest to the time evolution of the overlap ratio for "Psychology" and "Physics and Astronomy" disciplines. The Kendall rank correlation coefficients and the overlap ratio decrease nearly linearly over time, except for the first year, where their decay is significantly faster. The analogy between human wealth and the prestige indicators of journals is strengthened by performing a Monte Carlo simulation of the time evolution of the probability distribution function of Scimago Journal Rank. The simulation is based on a simple model of economic systems. Due to the different coverage of the journals in Scimago Journal & Country Rank and Web of Science, the identically defined measures based on the data in these databases are different.

The impact of COVID-19 on global health journals: an analysis of impact factor and publication trends

BACKGROUND

COVID-19 has affected research productivity across all areas of knowledge. Current evidence suggests that COVID-19 has had a blockbuster effect on journal impact factors (JIFs) and publication trends, while little is known on global health journals.

METHODS

Twenty global health journals were included to analyse the impact of COVID-19 on their JIFs and publication trends. Indicator data, including numbers of publications, citations, articles with different types, etc, were extracted from journal websites and Web of Science Core Collection database. The JIFs from 2019 to 2021 were simulated for longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses. Interrupted time-series analysis and non-parametric tests were applied to assess whether COVID-19 had decreased non-COVID-19 publications from January 2018 to June 2022.

RESULTS

In 2020, 615 out of 3223 publications were COVID-19 related, accounting for 19.08%. The simulated JIFs of 17 out of 20 journals in 2021 were higher than those in 2019 and 2020. Notably, 18 out of 20 journals had a decrease in their simulated JIFs after excluding COVID-19-related publications. Moreover, 10 out of 20 journals decreased their monthly numbers of non-COVID-19 publications after the COVID-19 outbreak. For all the 20 journals as a whole, after the COVID-19 outbreak in February 2020, the total number of non-COVID-19 publications significantly decreased by 14.2 compared with the previous month (p=0.013), and since then, on average, the publications had decreased by 0.6 per month until June 2022 (p<0.001).

CONCLUSIONS

COVID-19 has impacted the structure of COVID-19-related publications, the JIFs of global health journals and their numbers of non-COVID-19 publications. Although journals may benefit from increased JIFs, global health journals should avoid relying on a single metric. More follow-up studies including more years of data with a combination of metrics should be conducted to generate more robust evidence.

The Influence of International Collaboration on the Scientific Impact in V4 Countries

Several strategies are used by researchers and research facilities to increase their scientific production and consequent research quality. Bibliometric records show that coauthorship and the number of participating organizations in research publications are steadily increasing; however, the effect of collaboration varies across disciplines, and the corresponding author’s country appears to influence research impact. This finding inspired our research question for this study: How does international cooperation affect scientific impact, and does the affiliation of corresponding authors influence citation impact indicators at the level of individual publications? To this end, we provide a comparative evaluation of research articles published in Q1 journals among Visegrad Group countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) in Medical and Health sciences between 2017 and 2021. The study investigates the relationship between collaboration type (national vs. international) and scientific impact (impact factor of the journal and category normalized citation impact or research papers), as well as the impact of the country of the corresponding author’s affiliation on quantitative quality of individual papers. We show that Q1 research papers in international collaboration have a higher scientific impact than papers published in national partnerships. Moreover, the corresponding authors’ country of affiliation significantly affects scientific impact.