Different metrics and terminologies involved in journals and publication process

1. Journal jargons- metrics and beyond
Prof (Dr) Viyatprajna Acharya
Dept of Biochemistry
IMS & SUM Hospital, Bhubaneswar

2. METRICS EVERYWHERE!!!

3. What is a journal??
• Collections of personal writing about or
around a topic or general theme.
• Entries should be made on a regular basis –
daily or frequently - and are usually kept
together in a notebook or folder.

4. Academic journal
• Also called scholarly journal
• Peer-reviewed or refereed
• Particular academic discipline
• serve as forums for the introduction and
presentation for quest of new research, and
the critique of existing research
• Scientific journals

5. Frequency of journals
• Monthly
• Bimonthly
• Annually
• Biannually
• 10 times/year
• 36 times/ year
• Weekly!

6. Open access (OA) journals
• Scholarly journal
• Available online
• Research outputs are shared without financial, legal or
technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining
access to the internet itself
• It is not free!
• Freely downloadable articles
• By Feb 2019- 12,728 OA journals listed in DOAJ (Directory of
open access journals) !!!

7. Advantages of OA journals
• Open Access enhances visibility and impact of one's own
work as Open Access articles are downloaded and cited
more frequently than articles from non-Open Access
journals..
• Free access to scientific knowledge, information and data
strengthens the basis for transfer (education), development
(research) and valorization of knowledge
• Developing countries and small or specialized research
institutions and corporations have access to all Open Access
articles.
• Open Access articles are published sooner than articles in
non-Open Access journals.
• Open Access articles reach broader audiences than articles
in non-Open Access journals.

8. Disadvantages of OA journals
• Quality Open Access journals do not yet have
the same established reputation as traditional
journals.
• Open Access publishing is as yet not cheaper
than the current costs of licences, and
therefore may be a costly affair
• Predatory Open Access journals try to mislead
and cheat authors.

9. Predatory journals
• Jeffrey Beall - coined the term; Librarian at University
of Colorado
• No clear definition
• Cabell’s blacklist- 4000 predatory journals
• Claim to peer-review but falsely show a list of peer-
reviewers who might not have agreed for the process

10. Why predatory journals??
• Fast publication
• Quantity over quality
• Selection in interviews based
on number of publications
• Promotion criteria
• Many are PUBMED indexed
too!!!

11. How do we recognise predatory
journals??
• No single editor
• Review board members do not have expertise in the fields
• Insufficient info regarding fees
• No proper indexing
• Name of a journal is unrelated with the journal’s mission
• Name of a journal does not adequately reflect its origin - e.g. Swiss
journal may not be published from Switzerland
• poorly maintained websites, including dead links, prominent
misspellings and grammatical errors on the website
• Makes unauthorised use of licensed images on their website, taken
from the open web, without permission or licensing from the
copyright owners
• Re-publish papers

12. …..Contd.
• Use boastful language claiming to be a ‘leading
publisher’ even though the publisher may only be a
start-up or a novice organisation
• Provide minimal or no copyediting or proofreading
of submissions.
• Publish papers that are not academic at all, e.g.
essays by lay people, polemical editorials, or pseudo-
science
• Have a ‘contact us’ page that only includes a web
form or an email address, and the publisher hides or
does not reveal its location
• Excessively broad field or combine 2-3 fields
together that are not even much related

13. Think…. Check…. Submit
1. Do you or your colleagues know the journal?
2. Can you easily identify and contact the publisher?
3. Is the journal clear about the type of peer review
it uses?
4. Are articles indexed in services that you use?
5. Is it clear what fees will be charged?
6. Do you recognise the editorial board?
7. Is the publisher a member of a recognised
industry initiative (COPE,DOAJ,OASPA)?

14. Types of articles
• Scientific article
• Original article: Where the author presents empirical studies and for the first
time describes the results of research work.
• Review article: They are the conclusions after critical reviews of previously
published studies.
• Theoretical article: It aims at developing new theories from existing research.
• Meta-analysis: It is an analysis of different studies of similar concepts.
 Provide an estimate of the unknown common truth,
 Can contrast results from different studies
 Identify patterns among study results, sources of disagreement among those
results, or other interesting relationships that may come to light in the context
of multiple studies.
 Meta-analyses are often but not always an essential component of systematic
reviews. Appropriate statistical analysis is applied.
 Involve statistical analyses

15. ISSN (International Standard Serial
Number)
• Worldwide identification code
• Used by publishers, suppliers, libraries,
information services, bar coding systems, union
catalogues
• Needed for citations and retrieval of serials
• International publicity
• HQ-Paris
• India- National Science Library (NSL)
• Print and hard copy ISSN are different!!

17. How good is your journal???
• Indexing
• Impact factor
• Eigen factor

18. Indexing agencies
• Index medicus- Most comprehensive one for
Medical journals (Since 1879)
• MedLine
• PubMed
• EMBASE
• SCOPUS
• EBSCO Publishing's Electronic Databases
• SCIRUS
• Many national and regional databases also there

19. Impact factor
• Impact factor
• 5-year impact factor
• Immediacy index
• Impact factor without self-cites

20. IF Calculation
• Impact factor of the journal J in the year X=A/B
• A = number of total citations in the year X received
by all items published in the journal J in the years (X-
1) and (X-2)
• B = total number of all citable items published
in the journal J in the years (X-1) and (X-2).
• Citable items - only papers and reviews and do not
include errata, editorials and abstracts.
• In the counting of A, however, citations to all items
published in J are included
• 5 year IF is similar but calculated over 5 years- slow
citation

21. Immediacy index
• Total number of citations received in the year
X by all items published in the same year X
• High citation
• Self-citation- Published earlier in the same
journal

22. Eigen factor score
• A journal's Eigenfactor score is measured as
its importance to the scientific community.
• Scores are scaled so that the sum of all
journal scores is 100.
• In 2006, Nature had the highest score of 1.992
• Intended to reflect the influence and prestige
of journals

23. Few more rankings….
• SCImago journal rank (SJR)
• Scopus (Elsevier)

24. Should IF be used to evaluate
research????
• Use of journal impact factors conceals the difference in
article citation rates (articles in the most cited half of
articles in a journal are cited 10 times as often as the least
cited half)
• Journals’ impact factors are determined by technicalities
unrelated to the scientific quality of their articles
• Journal impact factors depend on the research field: high
impact factors are likely in journals covering large areas of
basic research with a rapidly expanding but short lived
literature that use many references per article
• Article citation rates determine the journal impact factor,
not vice versa !!!

25. How good is my article
• How many times cited
• How many reads- Researchgate
• Metrics to measure RG score too!!!

26. Improving citation
1. Use A Unique Name Consistently
2. Use a standardized institutional affiliation and address, using no
abbreviations
3. Repeat key phrases in the abstract while writing naturally.
4. Assign keyword terms to the manuscript
5. Make a unique phrase that reflects author's research interest
and use it throughout academic life.
6. Publish in journal with high impact factor
7. Self-archive articles. Free online availability increases a paper's
impact
8. Keep your professional web pages and published lists up to date
9. Make your research easy to find, especially for online searchers
10. Open Access (OA) increases citation rate

27. Citation style
• Vancouver style
• APA style

28. How good am I??
H index
• Scientific productivity and the
scientific impact of an
individual scientist
• Calculated automatically - Web
of Science and Scopus
• Manually in other databases
that provide citation
information (e.g. SciFinder,
PsychINFO, Google Scholar)

29. Alternatives of H index
1. Complement of h-index- g index, R index etc
2. Based on publication age
3. Based on total number of authors
4. Combination of two indices
5. Based on excess citation count
6. Based on the total number of publications
7. Other types of indices
(a) Based on the core tail ratio
(b) Based on improving h-index to higher values
(c) Based on variants of citation process
(d) Miscellaneous indices

30. Few More….
• Altmetrics – Rate journals based on scholarly
references added to academic social media
sites.
• Diam Score – A measure of scientific influence
of academic journals based on recursive
citation weighting and the pair wise
comparisons between journals.
• IPR- Intellectual property rights- Who owns
it???

31. NOTHING IS ENOUGH
• An ever-continuing process
• Metrics and parameters are always changing
• Good research is better than good impact
• Research interest should be towards betterment of
the society and mankind

32. Thank You!!
www.vpacharya.com