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

Juan Gorraiz (), Ursula Ulrych (), Wolfgang Glänzel (), Wenceslao Arroyo-Machado () and Daniel Torres-Salinas ()
Additional contact information
Juan Gorraiz: University of Vienna, Vienna University Library
Ursula Ulrych: University of Vienna, Vienna University Library
Wolfgang Glänzel: KU Leuven
Wenceslao Arroyo-Machado: University of Granada
Daniel Torres-Salinas: University of Granada

Scientometrics, 2022, vol. 127, issue 12, No 22, 7229-7251

Abstract: Abstract The aim of this study is to analyze to which extent the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) reflects the amount of excellent publications contained in a journal in the corresponding subject category. We are introducing two percentile-based indicators in order to measure the excellence contribution at journal level. Calculations of these indicators have been carried out for twenty different Journal Citation Reports (JCR) subject categories to investigate the correlation with Garfield’s Journal Impact Factor. Differences in the ranking according to all three indicators especially in First Quartile (Q1) of each category are shown and discussed. We have also studied the effect of multidisciplinary journals to the excellence contribution at category level and observed considerable differences between the twenty considered categories under analysis. Their omission would lead to neglect a large part of excellent publications, especially in the hard sciences. The introduced excellence indicators are very robust considering the types of documents considered for their calculation. The results of this study show that the journal excellence content is not completely reflected in the JIF measure and affects both Science and Social Science Edition categories. Therefore, the introduction of journal excellence indicators will help to give a more complete picture of the citation impact of a journal, because they are informing directly about the total and normalized excellence contribution of each journal to the corresponding subject category. They are a valuable enrichment and complement of the JIF, and more suitable than the Journal Citation Indicator, recently added to the JCR, because they reflect the inherent skewness of the citation distribution.

Keywords: Journal impact factor; Journals; Excellence; Contribution; Indicators; Citation impact (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-022-04295-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:127:y:2022:i:12:d:10.1007_s11192-022-04295-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-022-04295-9

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().