When a journal is both at the ‘top’ and the ‘bottom’: the illogicality of conflating citation-based metrics with quality

The ‘quality’, ‘prestige’, and ‘impact’ of a scholarly journal is largely determined by the number of citations its articles receive. Publication and citation metrics play an increasingly central (but contested) role in academia, often influencing who gets hired, who gets promoted, and who gets funded. These metrics are also of interest to institutions, as they may impact government funding, and their position in influential university rankings. Within this context, researchers around the world are experiencing pressure to publish in the ‘top’ journals. But what if a journal is considered a ‘top’ journal, and a ‘bottom’ journal at the same time? We recently came across such a case, and wondered if it was just an anomaly, or if it was more common than we might assume. This short communication reports the findings of our investigation into the nature and extent of this phenomenon in Scimago Journal Country and Rank (SJR) and Journal Citation Reports (JCR), both of which produce influential citation-based metrics. In analyzing around 25,000 journals and 12,000 journals respectively, we found that they are commonly placed into multiple subject categories. If citation-based metrics are an indication of broader concepts of research/er quality, which is so often implied or inferred, then we would expect that journals would be ranked similarly across these categories. However, our findings show that it is not uncommon for journals to attract citations to differing degrees depending on their category, resulting in journals that may at the same time be perceived as both ‘high’ and ‘low’ quality. This study is further evidence of the illogicality of conflating citation-based metrics with journal, research, and researcher quality, a continuing and ubiquitous practice that impacts thousands of researchers.