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Article

Effect of Common Extraneous Citation Optimizing Factors on Journal Impact Indicators

Rabishankar Giri1★, Sabuj Kumar Chaudhuri2★ Corresponding author

  1. 1Presidency University, College Street, Kolkata, West Bengal, INDIA.
  2. 2Department of Library and Information Science, University of Calcutta, College Street, Kolkata, West Bengal, INDIA.

CORRESPONDENCE

Rabishankar Giri

Presidency University, College Street, Kolkata, West Bengal, INDIA.

rsgiri11@gmail.com

Received: 02-01-2020; Revised: 17-02-2020; Accepted: 17-03-2020.

Volume 9, Issue 1 · pp. 63–69 · PUBLISHED · DOI: 10.5530/jscires.9.1.7

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ABSTRACT

Influence of a research journal is usually assessed in contemporary academia by Journal Impact Factor (JIF) given by Journal Citation Reports (JCR) published annually by Clarivate Analytics. JCR also provides Journal Immediacy Index (JII), an additional citation parameter which indicates current impact of journals. These citation based measures are simple arithmetic mean of raw citation counts to source publications. It is opined and empirically tested that three major extraneous citation optimizing factors i.e., Author self-citation (ASC), Journal self-citation (JSC) and Recitation (RC) can inflate these popular citation based metrics. This study examines nineteen Scopus index Library and Information Science (LIS) journals to understand individual as well as unified effects of these three optimizing factors on three popular impact indicators i.e., 2-year JIF, 3-year JIF and JII. It is found that ASC and JSC have noticeable effects on these impact indicators. Further, it is observed that these impact indicators exhibit very poor correlation among them when their values are deduced from raw citation counts, though all of them express simple arithmetic mean values. However, modified impact indicators calculated after excluding citations due to these optimizing factors, exhibit moderate to strong correlation among them. It is therefore concluded that more refined method that can automatically exclude the effect of these optimizing factors in their derivation may be needed for fair assessment of a journal’s relative impact in scholarly communication.

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    Giri, R., & Chaudhuri, S. K. (). Effect of Common Extraneous Citation Optimizing Factors on Journal Impact Indicators. Journal of Scientometric Research, 9(1), 63–69. https://doi.org/10.5530/jscires.9.1.7