Citation rates, knowledge export and international visibility of dermatology journals listed and not listed in theJournal Citation Reports

Abstract

Publication and citation data for the thirty journals listed in the Dermatology & VenerealDiseases category of the 1996 edition of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) on CDROM andseven dermatology journals not listed in the JCR-1996 were retrieved online from DIMDI andanalysed with respect to short- and long-term impact factors, ratios of cited to uncited papers, aswell as knowledge export and international visibility.

The short-term impact factors (calculated according to the rules applied in the JCR) are verysimiliar to their JCR counterparts; thus there are only minor changes in the rankings according toJCR impact factors and those calculated on the basis of online data. The non-JCR journals rankwithin the upper (two titles) and the lower third of the 37 journals (one title being at the upper endof the last third and the other four titles being at the very end of the list). Ranking the journalsaccording to their long-term impact factors results in no major changes of a journal's position.Normalized mean citation rates which give a more direct impression of a journals's citedness inrelation to the average citedness of its subfield are also shown.

Ratios of cited to uncited papers parallel in general the impact factors, i.e., journals withhigher (constructed) impact factors have a higher percentage of cited papers. For each journal, theGini concentration coefficient was calculated as a measure of unevenness of the citationdistribution. In general, journals with higher (constructed) impact factors have higher Ginicoefficients, i.e., the higher the impact factors the more uneven the citation distribution.

Knowledge export and international visibility were measured by determination of the distinctcategories to which the citing journals have been assigned ("citing subfields") and of the distinctcountries to which the citing authors belong ("citing countries"), respectively. Each journalexhibits a characteristic profile of citing subfields and citing countries. Normalized rankingsbased on knowledge export and international visibility (relating the number of published papers tothe number of distinct subfields and distinct countries) are to a large extent different compared tothe impact factor rankings. It is concluded that the additional data given, especially the data onknowledge export and international visibility, are necessary ingredients of a comprehensivedescription of a journal's significance and its position within its subject category.