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Journal of Electronic Resourcesin Medical LibrariesPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/werm20

Beyond Core Journal Lists:Identifying the Best Journalsfor Your CollectionSylvia McAphee a , Lee Vucovich a & Elizabeth R.Lorbeer aa University of Alabama at Birmingham, Lister HillLibrary of the Health Sciences , Birmingham, AL35294-0013Published online: 18 Dec 2008.

To cite this article: Sylvia McAphee , Lee Vucovich & Elizabeth R. Lorbeer (2008)Beyond Core Journal Lists: Identifying the Best Journals for Your Collection,Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries, 5:4, 373-377, DOI:10.1080/15424060802453761

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15424060802453761

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eJOURNALS FORUM

Janna C. Lawrence and Mori Lou Higa,Column Editors

Beyond Core Journal Lists:Identifying the Best Journals for

Your Collection

Sylvia McApheeLee Vucovich

Elizabeth R. Lorbeer

ABSTRACT. Core title lists provide guidance on journal selectionand retention in the medical specialties. A consensus can easily bereached for popular biomedical titles but not with specialty and sub-specialty titles. Discovering which journals are core in niche groups

Sylvia McAphee, MLS (smcaphee@uab.edu) is Serials Librarian &Instructor; Lee Vucovich, MS, MLS, AHIP (lvucovi@uab.edu) is AssistantDirector for Reference Services & Assistant Professor and Elizabeth R.Lorbeer, EdM, MLS (lorbeer@uab.edu) is Associate Director for ContentManagement & Assistant Professor, all at University of Alabama atBirmingham, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences, 1530 3rd AvenueSouth, Birmingham, AL 35294-0013.

Comments and suggestions should be sent to the Column Editors: Janna C.Lawrence (janna-lawrence@uiowa.edu) and Mori Lou Higa (mori.lou.higa@utsouthwestern.edu).

Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries, Vol. 5(4) 2008# 2008 by The Haworth Press. All rights reserved.

doi: 10.1080/15424060802453761 373

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requires further analysis in bibliometrics, peer group comparison, andusage statistics.

KEYWORDS. Bibliometrics, core title lists, journal selection, usagestatistics

It’s easy to locate an authoritative core list of journal titles in thehealth sciences. The most well known is the Brandon=Hill SelectedLists, even though it was retired in 2003. For more than 40 years,the Brandon=Hill Selected Lists provided hospital libraries with asuggested list of journal titles that health care providers reliedupon for authoritative opinions in the biomedical disciplines. Thesejournals served the general interests of the medical community andcontinue to be a foundation to any personal, hospital, or academichealth sciences library. However, the most popular journals in anybiomedical field cannot support all of a health professional’s needfor information. There is a strong reliance on specialty and sub-specialty journals, and defining core titles in this group is compli-cated.

The rationale behind the creation of core lists is based onBradford’s Law, which holds that most of the cited literature inany discipline (about one-third) is published in a small, core numberof journals. Bibliometrics, primarily citation analysis, has been usedto determine the publication patterns in disciplines and to identifythe most respected and prestigious journals within them. For collec-tion development, though, selection of journals on the edge of thecore, where there are many more journals of marginal impact, is chal-lenging and cost-per-use and similar metrics become important.Citation analysis, at the national or institutional level, provides asnapshot of usage over the time period studied that may be used toidentify core journals for collection. Inherent in its use in collectiondevelopment is the premise that the most heavily cited journals arethe most heavily used. These studies take significant time, so one tooloften used for journal ranking is Thomson Reuters’ Journal CitationReports (JCR), specifically the journal impact factor. JCR usescitation data drawn from 7,500-plus high impact scholarly journalsto provide metrics for journal evaluation and comparison. Specifi-cally, the impact factor is the average number of times articles fromthe journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR

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year; it is calculated by dividing the number of citations in the JCRyear by the total number of articles published in the two previousyears. Although most articles cited are from different journals, self-citations are included in the calculations.

In order to use impact factors and similar tools effectively, it isimportant to understand limitations of the citation analysis studieson which they are based. Citations are not always an indicator ofquality but may be cited to point out inaccuracies or errors in theresearch. In addition, long articles are often cited more frequently,journal visibility and prestige may affect citation rates, and self-citation can artificially inflate citation counts. Also, several factorscan influence impact factors including the research field (subject spe-cialty), journal history and format, types of articles published, andthe two-year measurement window. Other limitations are that impactfactors are biased toward U.S. publishers, and the impact factor isvulnerable to manipulation. It is also important to remember that anewer journal may not yet be indexed in Web of Science (WOS) ortracked in the JCR database long enough to have an impact factor.JCR, in its help file, Using JCR Wisely warns, ‘‘You should notdepend solely on citation data in your journal evaluations. Citationdata are not meant to replace informed peer review.’’ A few recentstudies point toward an excellent correlation between peer assessmentand impact factors in the fields of neuroscience and clinical neurol-ogy. Such studies support the use of impact factors by librariansand researchers to identify the most prestigious journals in a field.

Recently, several new journal ranking tools have entered thecitation market. In May 2008, Elsevier’s Scopus launched ScopusJournal Analyzer, which promises comparative metrics for journalswithin subject areas based on citation data collected from more than15,000 journals. Of interest to those without licenses to JCR or Sco-pus are two free journal ranking tools, Eigenfactor, and SCImagoJournal and Country Rank.

Eigenfactor<http://www.eigenfactor.org> uses citation datafrom JCR and employs algorithms similar to Google Page Rank toidentify the most ‘‘influential’’ journals. Journals can be searchedindividually or by JCR subject categories and ranked by either Arti-cle InfluenceTM Score (a measure of a journal’s prestige based on perarticle citations and comparable to the impact factor) or by Eigenfac-torTM Score (a measure of the overall value provided by all of thearticles published in a given journal in a year.) Calculations on impact

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are based on a five-year window. They have added a ‘‘cost effective-ness search’’ based on data from<http://www.journalprices.com>.

SCImago<http://www.scimagojr.com> also uses an algorithmsimilar to Google page rank, but uses Scopus citation data to providea new metric, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR). Over the time frameincluded in the database, Scopus includes 20-45% more records thanWOS. The calculations are based on a window of three years. Topjournals in the SJR rankings are broadly similar to those generatedby JCR, but there are striking differences. Some differences can beexplained in terms of popularity versus prestige, as prestige is fac-tored into the SJR. It will be interesting to review the assessmentof these tools and see how the core lists for specific disciplines aregenerated by each compare.

Journal usage at individual institutions may not reflect the nationaltrends, of course. Many citations studies, therefore, have been under-taken at the institutional level, assessing citation patterns of keyresearchers in a discipline or bibliographies of PhD theses, as wellas noting the journals in which the researchers choose to publish.These, while very useful in determining core journals for the insti-tution, are also very time-consuming. So, other metrics to measurelocal usage are being sought; measuring download (and online brows-ing) counts is one. Currently, there is concern with the standardiza-tion of measurement for downloads and similar metrics. Whenthese concerns are addressed, downloads and similar usage numberscould provide a useful complement to impact factors in creating corelists for individual institutions.

In looking at metrics for journal assessment, COUNTER (Count-ing Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources) has provided aconsistent method for publishers to report electronic journal usage totheir customers. Publishers realized that libraries used statistics tovalidate purchasing decisions as well as quality when looking atmetrics and journal full text usage. According to the Project COUN-TER Web site<http://projectcounter.org>, subscribers wanted abetter way to ‘‘understand how the journals they bought were beingused,’’ and publishers wanted to know how ‘‘the information pro-ducts they disseminated were being accessed.’’ COUNTER createda ‘‘standardized way’’ to provide reliable usage data on journals.The coupling of COUNTER with a new initiative called SUSHI(Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) will make gath-ering usage statistics easier for libraries. Currently, a subscriber must

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gather usage at each publisher’s Web site to obtain electronic journalusage data. SUSHI will allow subscribers to go to a single place onthe Web and retrieve a COUNTER usage report. SUSHI will alsoallow Electronic Resource Management System (ERMS) providersthe vehicle they need to provide automated cost per use data to theirclients. This will be very helpful in historical journal cost analysis andother metrics used in collection assessments.

There is another important question to consider when addressingjournal collections and using core lists as an aid in collection develop-ment. Should a journal title be considered core if it is subscribed to bya majority of libraries in a peer group? The answer is yes. The title isof value to a biomedical audience it serves. With interdisciplinaryprograms on many campuses today, a journal can count as a core titlefor several different subjects. Comparing journal holdings amongst alibrary peer group is a practical method to determine core titles.

Publishers of medical journals know which titles are their ‘‘breadand butter.’’ These are the journals that attract high personal sub-scription rates as well a loyal institutional subscriber base amonglibraries. Core titles often have strong impact factors, and publisherstend to price subscriptions accordingly to maintain a continuousrevenue stream. The content published attracts a wide audience,and reputation is paramount in maintaining yearly renewals. A title’ssuccess provides preferred core status from similar publications.

The authors of this article are of the opinion that core lists aremeaningful, but that more than one method exists with differentresults. Generally, core subject-based lists, citation measurementtools, and peer comparison provide guidance in identifying andselecting titles appropriate for a biomedical collection. A drawbackto any core list is that it only captures at its creation the best of what’scurrently being published. New titles are introduced each year,especially in the subspecialties, expanding the literature landscapeand requiring continuous collection analysis.

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