Positioning Open Access Journals in a LIS Journal Ranking
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Positioning Open Access Journals in a LIS Journal Ranking Jingfeng Xia This research uses the h-index to rank the quality of library and information science journals between 2004 and 2008. Selected open access (OA) journals are included in the ranking to assess current OA development in support of scholarly communication. It is found that OA journals have gained momentum supporting high-quality research and publication, and some OA journals have been ranked as high as the best traditional print journals. The findings will help convince scholars to make more contri- butions to OA journal publications, and also encourage librarians and information professionals to make continuous efforts for library publishing. ccording to the Budapest the complexity of publication behaviors, Open Access Initiatives, open various approaches have been developed access (OA) denotes “its free to assist in journal ranking, of which availability on the public comparing the rates of citation using internet, permitting any users to read, citation indexes to rate journals has been download, copy, distribute, print, search, popularly practiced and recognized in or link to the full texts of these articles, most academic disciplines. ISI’s Journal crawl them for indexing, pass them as Citation Reports (JCR) is among the most data to software, or use them for any other used rankings, which “offers a systematic, lawful purpose, without financial, legal, objective means to critically evaluate the or technical barriers other than those world’s leading journals, with quantifi- inseparable from gaining access to the able, statistical information based on internet itself.”1 Therefore, an OA journal citation data.”4 Yet, citation-based journal is referred to as one that is freely available rankings, such as JCR, have included few online in full text. Conversely, a non-OA open access journals on their lists. Of journal is one that needs subscription and these limited OA journals, many were thus is not freely available.2 There are either recently converted into open access scholarly journals that were subscription- or are publicly available with conditions. based but are later converted to OA.3 The relative exclusion of OA journals Academic journal ranking serves as an creates two deficiencies for scholarly important criterion for the scholarly com- communication. First, these rankings may munity to assess research quality and for not accurately portray the full picture of librarians to select the best publications journal publications to reflect an ongoing for collection development. Because of advancement in scholarship. Second, they Jingfeng Xia is Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University; e-mail: [email protected]. The author is grateful to Professor Debora Shaw for her help. © Jingfeng Xia Attribution-NonCommercial (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) CC BY-NC 134 crl-234 Positioning Open Access Journals in a LIS Journal Ranking 135 may discourage the open access move- ensure the validity of a direct match be- ment by marginalizing the majority of tween the absolute numbers. For absolute OA journals. In fact, some OA journals numbers, GS returns more citations than have successfully built reputations, at- both Scopus and WoS databases.8 tracting high-quality articles and sizable An easy solution is to calculate the numbers of citations. This research is an citation indexes of both OA and non-OA attempt to add selected OA journals to the journals from the same data source. WoS journal quality rankings using library and citation records do not allow direct com- information science (LIS) as an example. parison because many OA journal articles It is helpful to detect the position of are not included; however, GS offers a OA journals in journal rankings so that good dataset with which to work. Many scholars can recognize the progresses of studies have measured the quality of GS OA publishing and make active contribu- searches and the similarities between tions to support the OA movement. Such WoS and GS.9 The correlation between rankings will also encourage librarians datasets from the two sources is consis- and information professionals to improve tently found to be significant. Additional the existing library publishing enterprise studies also recognize GS as a reliable and make continuous efforts for journal citation provider for bibliometric work,10 practices. particularly for the retrieval of OA article citations.11 Furthermore, GS returns more Background citations from conference papers, books, In a series of articles, Mukherjee reports and dissertations/theses, which show his studies on a group of 17 fully open ac- evidence of wider scholarly impact. There cess LIS journals published in the period are some disadvantages of using GS for of 2000–2004.5 By calculating the citation citation analyses. For example, GS’s data rates of research papers in these journals, coverage is better for certain academic he uses journal impact factors and other fields (such as social sciences, arts, and indexes to evaluate their contribution to humanities) where books and conference scholarship. The impact factors and total papers constitute a large part of formal citation counts are matched to those avail- publications.12 Also, due to the short his- able in JCR for traditional LIS journals in tory of GS, its database contains fewer the same time span, with results indicat- citations for old publications.13 However, ing that some LIS OA journals have an these limitations will not affect our use of impact comparable with JCR journals. GS for OA journal ranking because this To be specific, “the actual number of Web analysis is based on new data from 2004 citations in the case of some of these for to 2008 and within a single discipline. at least seven OA journals was a bit lower Instead of relying on journal impact than ISI’s high-ranked LIS journals, but factors to compare OA journals, this much higher than median-ranked jour- analysis adopts the h-index approach nals.”6 His study is representative of the for journal ranking. The h-index is an very few investigations that have tried to improvement over simple citation mea- position OA journals in scholarly journal sures, emphasizing the total number of rankings. Yet the problem of Mukherjee’s citations or publications, and it works research is that he attempts to manipulate properly for comparing publications a simple comparison between two sets of in the same field.14 Since first proposed data from different citation data services: in 2005, its benefits of quantifying the one from ISI’s Web of Science (WoS) and impact of research outcomes have been the other from Google Scholar (GS). A widely recognized. Studies show that high degree of correlation between index- for citation analyses at the article level, es of these two databases, as discovered “the Spearman rank order correlation by Meho and Yang,7 does not necessarily between citation ranks and h-index 136 College & Research Libraries March 2012 (with self-citations excluded) was 0.9, • JCR’s collection of 61 journals, significant at the 0.01 level”;15 and, at the which are considered to represent the core journal level, “the Spearman correlation journals in LIS by ISI, in its “Information between the ISI JIF and the h-index—used Science & Library Science” category of the because both the JIF and h-index have 2008 edition. non-normal distributions—is strong and • Nisonger and Davis’ list of journals, very significant: 0.718 (p<0.000).”16 The rated by LIS education deans and ARL li- h-index is especially known for its robust brary directors, to supplement the journal performance and its combined effect for list in JCR.21 both quantity (number of publications) • Directory of Open Access Journals and quality (citation rate) in a balanced collection of a total of 116 OA journals in way. 17 The fact that the h-index works well LIS, retrieved at the end of 2010.22 for the calculation of journal citations for • Mukherjee’s list of 17 OA journals, a definite period makes it an appropriate which are freely accessible in full text and measure for OA journal analysis in this represent a group of core OA LIS journals research. in the data selection. Various studies have tested the h-index JCR’s list served as the basic collection and its value in assessing journal impact of LIS journals, which was re-evaluated in some academic fields. For example, by and also supplemented by adding rel- using the evidence of convergent and dis- evant journals from other sources listed criminatory validity, Hodge suggests the above. The following criteria were used real utility of the h-index for social work for the journal selection. journals and points to “its compatibility • Journals not published in English with the profession’s applied research were removed because both GS and WoS culture and its ability to be used with databases do not properly handle names essentially all journals in which social with diacritics, which are common in workers publish.”18 Harzing and van der many other languages. Wal apply the h-index to assess journal • OA journals with initial publica- impact in the field of economics and busi- tions after 2004 were removed to give ness and realize its advantages for a more every journal the same time period to ac- accurate and comprehensive measure of crue citations. Exceptions include journals journal impact.19 With a discovered strong that were originally published in print correlation between a journal’s impact and converted to open access after 2004. factor and its quality,20 we are confident • Non–peer-reviewed journals were of the application of the h-index in OA removed. The decision was based on journal assessment. manual inspections of journal articles that are not research in nature.