Comparing journals from different fields of science and social science through a JCR subject categories normalized impact factor

P. Dorta-González () and M. I. Dorta-González
Additional contact information
P. Dorta-González: Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
M. I. Dorta-González: Universidad de La Laguna
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Pablo Dorta-González

Scientometrics, 2013, vol. 95, issue 2, No 10, 645-672

Abstract: Abstract The journal Impact Factor (IF) is not comparable among fields of science and social science because of systematic differences in publication and citation behaviour across disciplines. In this work, a decomposing of the field aggregate impact factor into five normally distributed variables is presented. Considering these factors, a principal component analysis is employed to find the sources of the variance in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) subject categories of science and social science. Although publication and citation behaviour differs largely across disciplines, principal components explain more than 78 % of the total variance and the average number of references per paper is not the primary factor explaining the variance in impact factors across categories. The categories normalized impact factor based on the JCR subject category list is proposed and compared with the IF. This normalization is achieved by considering all the indexing categories of each journal. An empirical application, with one hundred journals in two or more subject categories of economics and business, shows that the gap between rankings is reduced around 32 % in the journals analyzed. This gap is obtained as the maximum distance among the ranking percentiles from all categories where each journal is included.

Keywords: Citation; Impact factor; Journal evaluation; Source normalized indicator; JCR subject categories (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-012-0929-9 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:95:y:2013:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-012-0929-9

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

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-012-0929-9

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 ().