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Extending citer analysis to journal impact evaluation

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Abstract

The concept of citer analysis investigated earlier by Ajiferuke and Wolfram (In: B. Larsen, J. Leta (eds.) Proceedings of the 12th international conference of the international society for scientometrics and informetrics (ISSI) pp. 798–808, 2009, Scientometrics 83:623–638, 2010) is extended to journals where different citing units (citers, citing articles, citing journals) are compared with the journal impact factor and each other to determine if differences in ranking arise from different measures. The citer measures for the 31 high impact journals studied from information science and library science are significantly correlated, even more so than the earlier citer analysis findings, indicating that there is a close relationship among the different units of measure. Still, notable differences in rankings for the journals examined were evident for the different measures used, especially from either 5-year impact factor or number of citing articles per publication to the number of citing journals per publication. The journals that are adversely affected seem to be those whose citations are concentrated in a few journals. This informed the need to develop a journal citation concentration index, which can serve as a complementary measure to the existing journal impact indices.

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Acknowledgments

This study represents an expanded version of a paper presented at the 14th International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics Conference held in Vienna in July 2013.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Library and Information Studies, University of Oklahoma, Bizzell Library, Room 120, 401 West Brooks, Norman, OK, 73019-6032, U.S.A

    Kun Lu

  2. Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, N6A 5B7, Canada

    Isola Ajiferuke

  3. School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, P.O. Box 413, Milwaukee, WI, 53201, U.S.A

    Dietmar Wolfram

Authors
  1. Kun Lu
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  2. Isola Ajiferuke
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  3. Dietmar Wolfram
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Isola Ajiferuke.

Additional information

Kun Lu: This research was conducted while the author was a member of the faculty at the School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 9, 10, and 11.

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Lu, K., Ajiferuke, I. & Wolfram, D. Extending citer analysis to journal impact evaluation. Scientometrics 100, 245–260 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1274-y

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