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

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  • P. Dorta-González

    (Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria)

  • M. I. Dorta-González

    (Universidad de La Laguna)

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.

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  • P. Dorta-González & M. I. Dorta-González, 2013. "Comparing journals from different fields of science and social science through a JCR subject categories normalized impact factor," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 95(2), pages 645-672, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:95:y:2013:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-012-0929-9
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-012-0929-9
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    5. Dorta-González, Pablo & Dorta-González, María Isabel & Santos-Peñate, Dolores Rosa & Suárez-Vega, Rafael, 2014. "Journal topic citation potential and between-field comparisons: The topic normalized impact factor," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 8(2), pages 406-418.
    6. Juan María Hernández & Pablo Dorta-González, 2020. "Interdisciplinarity Metric Based on the Co-Citation Network," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 8(4), pages 1-8, April.
    7. Siluo Yang & Xin Xing & Dietmar Wolfram, 2018. "Difference in the impact of open-access papers published by China and the USA," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(2), pages 1017-1037, May.
    8. Juan Gorraiz & Ursula Ulrych & Wolfgang Glänzel & Wenceslao Arroyo-Machado & Daniel Torres-Salinas, 2022. "Measuring the excellence contribution at the journal level: an alternative to Garfield’s impact factor," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(12), pages 7229-7251, December.
    9. Kaile Gong & Juan Xie & Ying Cheng & Vincent Larivière & Cassidy R. Sugimoto, 2019. "The citation advantage of foreign language references for Chinese social science papers," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(3), pages 1439-1460, September.
    10. Sánchez-Gil, Susana & Gorraiz, Juan & Melero-Fuentes, David, 2018. "Reference density trends in the major disciplines," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 42-58.
    11. Juan Miguel Campanario, 2018. "Are leaders really leading? Journals that are first in Web of Science subject categories in the context of their groups," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(1), pages 111-130, April.
    12. Chen, Kuan-Ming & Jen, Tsung-Hau & Wu, Margaret, 2014. "Estimating the accuracies of journal impact factor through bootstrap," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 8(1), pages 181-196.
    13. Craig, Russell & Cox, Adam & Tourish, Dennis & Thorpe, Alistair, 2020. "Using retracted journal articles in psychology to understand research misconduct in the social sciences: What is to be done?," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 49(4).
    14. Sara M. González-Betancor & Pablo Dorta-González, 2019. "Publication modalities ‘article in press’ and ‘open access’ in relation to journal average citation," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(3), pages 1209-1223, September.
    15. Tomislav Korman & Tomislav Malvić & Vasyl Lozynskyi & Zlatko Briševac & Zoran Kovač & Lidia Hrnčević & Krešimir Pavlić, 2024. "Mining and Mineral Processing Journals in the WoS and Their Rankings When Merging SCIEx and ESCI Databases—Case Study Based on the JCR 2022 Data," Publications, MDPI, vol. 12(1), pages 1-13, January.
    16. J. M. Calabuig & A. Ferrer-Sapena & E. A. Sánchez-Pérez, 2016. "Vector-valued impact measures and generation of specific indexes for research assessment," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 108(3), pages 1425-1443, September.

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