Abstract
h-indexes, Journal Impact Factors and CiteScores are often presented as a single numeric value, without providing any context. Under such circumstances, the reader is unable to fully appreciate, or comprehend, the information being presented. By not being transparent, it also presents the opportunity for unscrupulous operators, such as predatory journals, to provide non-sensical information in the hope that the potential author will misinterpret it and submit an article in the expectation that they are submitting to a high-quality journal. Dubious metrics are also able to enter the sector, again in the hope that their metric will be read under an incorrect assumption. Following an overview of the main metrics that are commonly used, this paper suggests how these metrics should be cited. Adopting these proposals would not only provide the reader will full information but also enable bogus measures, which have proliferated in recent years, to be recognized more easily.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment), https://sfdora.org/read/ (accessed January 11, 2024).
https://clarivate.com/the-institute-for-scientific-information/history-of-isi/ (accessed: January 11, 2024).
https://sfdora.org/ (accessed: January 11, 2024).
https://coara.eu/ (accessed January 11, 2024).
We choose this journal as we are familiar with it, but it is widely representative.
References
Bi, H.H. 2023. “Correction to: Four problems of the h-index for assessing the research productivity and impact of individual authors.” Scientometrics 128 (5): 2693–2699. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04455-x.
Callaway, E. 2016. “Beat it, impact factor! Publishing elite turns against controversial metric.” Nature 535 (7611): 210–211. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2016.20224.
Chung, H.-K. 2007. “Evaluating academic journals using impact factor and local citation score.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 33 (3): 393–402. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2007.01.016.
Dadkhah, M., G. Borchardt, M. Lagzian, and G. Bianciardi. 2017. “Academic journals plagued by bogus impact factors.” Publishing Research Quarterly 33 (2): 183–187. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-017-9509-4.
García, J.A., Rosa Rodriguez-Sánchez, and J. Fdez-Valdivia. 2011. “Ranking of the subject areas of Scopus.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 62 (10): 2013–2023. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21589.
Garfield, E. 1955. “Citation indexes for science. A new dimension in documentation through association of ideas.” Science 122 (3159): 108–111. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.122.3159.108. (republished in Garfield, 2006)
Garfield, E. 1999. “Journal impact factor: A brief review.” Canadian Medical Association Journal 161 (8): 979–980.
Garfield, E. 2006. “Citation indexes for science. A new dimension in documentation through association of ideas.” International Journal of Epidemiology 35 (5): 1123–1127. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyl189.
Garfield, G. 1980. “How it all began—With a loan from HFC.” Essays of an Information Scientist 4 (3): 359–362.
Garfield, E., and I.H. Sher. 1963. “New factors in the evaluation of scientific literature through citation indexing.” American Documentation 14 (3): 195–201. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.5090140304.
Gorraiz, J., U. Ulrych, W. Glänzel, W. Arroyo-Machado, and D. Torres-Salinas. 2022. “Measuring the excellence contribution at the journal level: An alternative to Garfield’s impact factor.” Scientometrics 127 (12): 7229–7251. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04295-9.
Gross, P.L.K., and E.M. Gross. 1927. “College libraries and chemical education.” Science 66 (1713): 385–389. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.66.1713.385.
Gutierrez, F.R.S., J. Beall, and D.A. Forero. 2015. “Spurious alternative impact factors: The scale of the problem from an academic perspective.” BioEssays 37 (5): 474–476. https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.201500011.
Hicks, D., P. Wouters, L. Waltman, S. de Rijcke, and I. Rafols. 2015. “Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics.” Nature 520 (7548): 429–431. https://doi.org/10.1038/520429a.
Hirsch, J.E. 2005. “An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output.” PNAS 102 (46): 16569–16572. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0507655102.
Hoeffel, C. 1998. “Journal impact factors.” Allergy 53 (12): 1225–1225. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1398-9995.1998.tb03848.x.
Hu, G., L. Wang, R. Ni, and W. Liu. 2020. “Which h-index? An exploration within the web of science.” Scientometrics 123 (3): 1225–1233. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03425-5.
Jalalian, M. 2015. “The story of fake impact factor companies and how we detected them.” Electronic Physician 7 (2): 1069–1072.
Jalalian, M., and H. Mahboobi. 2013. “New corruption detected: Bogus impact factors compiled by fake organizations.” Electronic Physician 5 (3): 685–686.
Kendall, G. 2021. “Beall’s legacy in the battle against predatory publishers.” Learned Publishing 34 (3): 379–388. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1374.
Kendall, G., and S. Linacre. 2022. “Predatory journals: Revisiting Beall’s research.” Publishing Research Quarterly 38 (3): 530–543. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-022-09888-z.
Kendall, G., A. Yee, and S. Hardy. 2017. “We should be just a number, and we should embrace it.” The Electronic Library 35 (2): 348–357. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-04-2016-0090.
Leena, G., and V.K.J. Jeevan. 2022. “Disrupting predatory journals.” Current Science 122 (4): 396–401.
Mryglod, O., Yu. Holovatch, and R. Kenna. 2022. “Big fish and small ponds: Why the departmental h-index should not be used to rank universities.” Scientometrics 127 (6): 3279–3292. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04373-y.
Okagbue, H.I., and J.A. Teixeira da Silva. 2020. “Correlation between the CiteScore and journal impact factor of top-ranked library and information science journals.” Scientometrics 124 (1): 797–801. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03457-x.
Pendlebury, D.A. 2021. 1.3 “Eugene Garfield and the Institute for Scientific Information.” In Handbook bibliometrics, edited by Rafael Ball, 27–40. De Gruyter Saur: Berlin, Boston.
Rossner, M., H. Van Epps, and E. Hill. 2007. “Show me the data.” Journal of Cell Biology 179 (6): 1091–1092. https://doi.org/10.1083/jcb.200711140.
Schubert, A., and G. Schubert. 2019. “All along the h-index-related literature: A guided tour.” In Springer Handbook of science and technology indicators, edited by Wolfgang Glänzel, Henk F. Moed, Ulrich Schmoch, and Mike Thelwall, 301–334. Berlin: Springer.
Seglen, P.O. 1997. “Citations and journal impact factors: Questionable indicators of research quality.” Allergy 52 (11): 1050–1056. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1398-9995.1997.tb00175.x.
Sinclair, M. 2019. “What is DORA?” Evidence Based Midwifery 17 (4): 111–112.
Teixeira da Silva, J.A., M. Moradzadeh, K.O.K. Adjei, C.M. Owusu-Ansah, M. Balehegn, E.I. Faúndez, M.D. Janodia, and A. Al-Khatib. 2022. “An integrated paradigm shift to deal with predatory publishing.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 48 (1): 102481. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2021.102481.
Torres-Salinas, D., P. Valderrama-Baca, and W. Arroyo-Machado. 2022. “Is there a need for a new journal metric? Correlations between JCR impact factor metrics and the Journal Citation Indicator-JCI.” Journal of Informetrics 16 (3): 101315. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2022.101315.
Upadhyay, A., and A. Kaushik. 2022. “DORA challenges.” British Dental Journal 233 (6): 439–440. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41415-022-5047-3.
Van Noorden, R. 2016. “Controversial impact factor gets a heavyweight rival.” Nature 540 (7633): 325–326. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2016.21131.
Walters, W.H. 2022. “The citation impact of the open access accounting journals that appear on Beall’s list of potentially predatory publishers and journals.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 48 (1): 102484. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2021.102484.
Wouters, P. 2017. “Eugene Garfield (1925–2017).” Nature 543 (7646): 492. https://doi.org/10.1038/543492a.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Kendall, G. More Transparency is Needed When Citing h-Indexes, Journal Impact Factors and CiteScores. Pub Res Q (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-024-09983-3
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-024-09983-3