Search

This work presents the development and testing of a protocol for identifying long-lasting (L-L) research papers for which citation data of at least 25 years are available. In the first step, papers having 100 or more citations are shortlisted. The time interval from the year of publication till 2019 is divided into four approximately equal quarters. The R4 parameter is defined as the ratio of the citations received by a paper in the most recent quarter to its total citations. Papers with R4 less than a prescribed cut-off value are eliminated. The trends in the citations of papers in the most recent five years are assessed next. Papers with less than a specified value of actual/extrapolated citations are omitted. For testing purpose, we have explored the citation patterns of 1,402 shortlisted papers, out of a total of 123,993 published from India between 1985 and 1994, resulting into 676 L-L papers. We find that not all papers published in high-impact journals as well as those receiving large citations fulfil the L-L criterion. Subject-wise analysis brings out the disciplines making lasting contributions to research.

Qualitative scientific journals play a vital role in scholarly communication processes. However, during the last few years, there is a mushroom growth of journals in every discipline in India. There has been no single source of systematic advice on how to measure the scientific value of Indian journals. The present study is an attempt to minimize the gap by developing a mechanism for measuring scientific value of Indian journals. Consulting various international databases and their journal inclusion policy, a viable mechanism has been devised and tested with 100+ Indian journals in the fields of physics, chemistry and biology. The results indicate that although the quantity of yearly additions of new journals in each of the three disciplines is quite impressive, the yearly discontinuation is also alarming. Almost 29% of physics journals, 11% of chemistry journals and 21% of biology journals were stopped within a year. Although irregularity in publication, improper execution of review process, non-disclosure of article processing charges, lower percentage of foreign contributors and low citation rate were identified as some drawbacks with Indian physics, chemistry and biology journals. The percentage of predatory journals in these three disciplines is quite less till date. In order to choose a better platform of scholarly publishing, this study suggests some recommendations for prospective authors.

Journal impact factor (JIF) is defined as the number of citations within a given year to items published by a journal in the preceding two years, divided by the number of citable items published by the journal during those two years. However, the ‘citable documents’ include only articles and reviews, and the ‘non-citable documents’ (NCDs) actually can be and are often cited, and some may have higher citations. Here we explore the cited characteristics of NCDs and their contributions to JIF. All data were taken from the Web of Science database. The results showed that 315,017 NCDs (including editorials, letters, reprints, news items, corrections, biographical items, and book reviews) could be retrieved from 2012 to 2013. There were 160,580 editorials and 81,652 letters with the respective citations of 98,434 and 40,692 in 2014; the citations per item were 0.613 and 0.498 respectively. The contributions of these two types of NCDs to JIF are obvious. Of the 64 journals with NCDs ≥ 500 or NCDs ≥ 10 while the citations ≥ 20, 19 showed contributions of NCDs to more than 20%. Although some journals publish more NCDs, their contributions to JIF are not obvious; only for a few journals are the NCDs contributions to JIF higher. These are mainly medical journals.

Journal impact factor is widely used in research evaluation. By using the 2016 Journal Citation Reports, we find that high impact factor journals publish more publications than expected and low impact factor journals publish less publications than expected. Our findings may be useful to optimize the journal based evaluation system.

A bibliometric analysis of 31,403 publications in Current Science between 1961 and 2015 revealed an unstable trend; the highest citations per publication appeared during 2003-2005. The impact factor of Current Science had an overall increasing trend and placed the journal in the quartile Q2 within 'Multidisciplinary sciences' category. The h-index of Current Science was 82 and 24 authors had more than one H-Classic articles. The most productive country was India and Current Science was dominated by contributions from Indian institutions. Analysis of author keywords showed 11 main research themes for the journal. These findings will help the readers to get a quick and intuitive overview of Current Science.

An analysis of 17,344 papers published by Indian scientists and indexed by Web of Science in the discipline of organic chemistry and its sub-disciplines during 2004-2013 indicates that the Indian output has increased significantly in the later period. Academic institutions contributed about 46% of the total output followed by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) with 26% of the total output. The most prolific institutions among them mainly belonging to academic institutions and CSIR contributed about 60% of the total output. The value of citation per paper for most of the prolific institutions was higher than the Indian average. Similar trend was observed for the relative citation impact. Indian researchers in the discipline of organic chemistry published their papers in international journals with impact factor greater than 1. About 11% of the papers published by Indian scientists in the discipline of organic chemistry during 2004-2013 remained uncited.