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This paper investigates different uses of the Journal Impact Factor in national journal rankings and discusses the merits of supplementing metrics with expert assessment. Our focus is national journal rankings, where a cross-country comparison is used as evidence to support decisions about the distribution of institutional funding or career advancement. The seven countries under comparison are: China, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Norway, Poland, and Turkey—and the region of Flanders in Belgium. With the exception of Italy, top-tier journals used in national rankings include those classified at the highest level, or according to tier, or points implemented. A total of 3,565 (75.8%) out of 4,701 unique top-tier journals were identified as having a Journal Impact Factor, with 55.7% belonging to the first Journal Impact Factor quartile. Journal rankings in China, Flanders, Poland, and Turkey classify journals with a Journal Impact Factor as being top-tier, but only when they are in the first quartile of the Average Journal Impact Factor Percentile (AJIFP). Journal rankings that result from expert assessment in Denmark, Finland, and Norway regularly classify journals as top-tier outside the first quartile, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. We conclude that experts, when tasked with metric-informed journal rankings, take into account quality dimensions that are not covered by Journal Impact Factors.

Interdisciplinary research is widely recognized as necessary to tackle some of the grand challenges facing humanity. It is generally believed that interdisciplinarity is becoming increasingly prevalent among Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. However, little is known about the evolution of interdisciplinarity in the Social Sciences. Also, how interdisciplinarity and its various aspects evolve over time has seldom been closely quantified and delineated. This paper answers these questions by capturing the disciplinary diversity of the knowledge base of scientific publications in nine broad Social Sciences fields over 55 years. The analysis considers diversity as a whole and its three distinct aspects, namely variety, balance, and disparity. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions are also conducted to investigate whether such change, if any, can be found among research with similar characteristics. We find that learning widely and digging deeply have become one of the norms among researchers in Social Sciences. Fields acting as knowledge exporters or independent domains maintain a relatively stable homogeneity in their knowledge base while the knowledge base of importer disciplines evolves towards greater heterogeneity. However, the increase of interdisciplinarity is substantially smaller when controlling for several author and publication related variables.

Generally, multicountry papers receive more citations than single-country ones. In this contribution, we examine if this rule also applies to American scientists publishing in highly visible interdisciplinary journals. Concretely, we compare the citations received by American scientists in Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of thei¾?Nationali¾?Academy ofi¾?Sciences of thei¾?Unitedi¾?States ofi¾?AmericaPNAS. It is shown that, statistically, American scientists publishing in Nature and Science do not benefit from international collaboration. This statement also holds for communicated submissions, but not for direct and for contributed submissions, to PNAS.

We discuss a real-world application of a recently proposed machine learning method for authorship verification. Authorship verification is considered an extremely difficult task in computational text classification, because it does not assume that the correct author of an anonymous text is included in the candidate authors available. To determine whether 2 documents have been written by the same author, the verification method discussed uses repeated feature subsampling and a pool of impostor authors. We use this technique to attribute a newly discovered Latin text from antiquity (the Compendiosa expositio) to Apuleius. This North African writer was one of the most important authors of the Roman Empire in the 2(nd) century and authored one of the world's first novels. This attribution has profound and wide-reaching cultural value, because it has been over a century since a new text by a major author from antiquity was discovered. This research therefore illustrates the rapidly growing potential of computational methods for studying the global textual heritage.

The objective of this article is to further the study of journal interdisciplinarity, or, more generally, knowledge integration at the level of individual articles. Interdisciplinarity is operationalized by the diversity of subject fields assigned to cited items in the article's reference list. Subject fields and subfields were obtained from the Leuven-Budapest (ECOOM) subject-classification scheme, while disciplinary diversity was measured taking variety, balance, and disparity into account. As diversity measure we use a Hill-type true diversity in the sense of Jost and Leinster-Cobbold. The analysis is conducted in 3 steps. In the first part, the properties of this measure are discussed, and, on the basis of these properties it is shown that the measure has the potential to serve as an indicator of interdisciplinarity. In the second part the applicability of this indicator is shown using selected journals from several research fields ranging from mathematics to social sciences. Finally, the often-heard argument, namely, that interdisciplinary research exhibits larger visibility and impact, is studied on the basis of these selected journals. Yet, as only 7 journals, representing a total of 15,757 articles, are studied, albeit chosen to cover a large range of interdisciplinarity, further research is still needed. ispartof: Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology vol:67 issue:5 pages:1257-1265 status: published

In this article we describe another problem with journal impact factors by showing that one journal's impact factor is dependent on other journals' publication delays. The proposed theoretical model predicts a monotonically decreasing function of the impact factor as a function of publication delay, on condition that the citation curve of the journal is monotone increasing during the publication window used in the calculation of the journal impact factor; otherwise, this function has a reversed U shape. Our findings based on simulations are verified by examining three journals in the information sciences: the Journal of Informetrics, Scientometrics, and the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.

This is a publisher ranking study based on a citation data grant from Elsevier, specifically, book titles cited in Scopus history journals (20072011) and matching metadata from WorldCat® (i.e., OCLC numbers, ISBN codes, publisher records, and library holding counts). Using both resources, we have created a unique relational database designed to compare citation counts to books with international library holdings or libcitations for scholarly book publishers. First, we construct a ranking of the top 500 publishers and explore descriptive statistics at the level of publisher type (university, commercial, other) and country of origin. We then identify the top 50 university presses and commercial houses based on total citations and mean citations per book (CPB). In a third analysis, we present a map of directed citation links between journals and book publishers. American and British presses/publishing houses tend to dominate the work of library collection managers and citing scholars; however, a number of specialist publishers from Europe are included. Distinct clusters from the directed citation map indicate a certain degree of regionalism and subject specialization, where some journals produced in languages other than English tend to cite books published by the same parent press. Bibliometric rankings convey only a small part of how the actual structure of the publishing field has evolved; hence, challenges lie ahead for developers of new citation indices for books and bibliometricians interested in measuring book and publisher impacts.

Beginning with a short review of Public Library of Science (PLOS) journals, we focus on PLOS ONE and more specifically the contributions of Chinese authors to this journal. It is shown that their contribution is growing exponentially. In 2013 almost one fifth of all publications in this journal had at least one Chinese author. The average number of citations per publication is approximately the same for articles with a Chinese author and for articles without any Chinese coauthor. Using the odds-ratio, we could not find arguments that Chinese authors in PLOS ONE excessively cite other Chinese contributions.

ispartof: Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology vol:66 issue:11 pages:2389-2389 status: published

The S-shaped functional relation between the mean citation score and the proportion of top 10% publications for the 500 Leiden Ranking universities is explained using results of the shifted Lotka function. Also the concave or convex relation between the proportion of top 100 theta% publications, for different fractions theta, is explained using the obtained new informetric model.

Using citation data of articles written by some Nobel Prize winners in physics, we show that concave, convex and straight curves represent different types of interactions between old ideas and new insights. These cases illustrate different diffusion characteristics of academic knowledge, depending on the nature of the new publications. In this way our work adds to the study of the development of science and links this development to citation analysis. ispartof: JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY vol:65 issue:2 pages:281-289 status: published

It is shown that a normalized version of the g-index is a good normalized impact and concentration measure. A proposal for such a measure by Bartolucci is improved.

This article examines whether the absolute and relative numbers of reviews are increasing in the following three subfields of medical sciences: Tropical Medicine, Infectious Diseases, and Oncology. It further examines if reviews are cited more frequently than are "normal" articles. All research questions are answered affirmatively: The absolute as well as the relative numbers of reviews in these three subfields are indeed increasing. In addition, reviews in these fields are cited more frequently than are normal articles: about 70% more often than are "normal" articles in Infectious Diseases and Oncology and about 50% more often in Tropical Medicine. The article discusses possible reasons for this increase and concludes that medical journals should strive to achieve an optimal balance between review papers and original articles.