some aspects of citation indexes in spain: a comparative analysis

Jointly published by Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest Scientometrics, Vol. 75, No. 2 (2008) 313–318 and Springer, Dordrecht DOI: 10.1007/s11192-007-1867-9

Received April 26, 2007

Address for correspondence:JULIA OSCA-LLUCHInstituto de Historia de la Ciencia y Documentación López Piñero Universitat de Valencia-CSIC, Valencia 46010, Spain E-mail: [email protected]

0138–9130/US $ 20.00 Copyright © 2008 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest All rights reserved

Some aspects of citation indexes in Spain: A comparative analysis

JULIA OSCA-LLUCH,a PEDRO BLESA,b JOSÉ MANUEL BARRUECO,cELENA VELASCO,a THOMAS KRICHELd

a Instituto de Historia de la Ciencia y Documentación López Piñero, Universitat de Valencia-CSIC, Valencia (Spain)

b Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación, Valencia (Spain)

c Universitat de Valencia, Biblioteca de Ciencias Sociales, Valencia (Spain) d Long Island University, Palmer School of Library and Information Science, Greenvale (USA)

This paper studies the main characteristics of the citation indexes currently developed in Spain. The paper compares the impact factors offered by Spanish citation indexes with the impact factor of Spanish journals also collected by the JCRs of the ISI (SCI and SSCI) over a five-year period (2001–2005). Spanish journals published in English have higher impact factor scores in the JCR databases of the ISI than in Spanish citation indexes.

Introduction

Among other requirements, the research activity of a scientific discipline must publish its findings, mainly in the form of papers published in scientific journals. In recent years, the gradual increase in research and development investment has encouraged an exponential growth in the number of scientific journals. This growth has led to the publication of a huge number of scientific and technical papers in each area of scientific knowledge, which makes it necessary to carefully select this type of publications on the basis of quality in order to identify the best journals within each speciality.

J. OSCA-LLUCH & AL.: Some aspects of citation indexes in Spain: A comparative analysis

314 Scientometrics 75 (2008)

Indeed, quantity and quality do not always correlate, which causes us to ponder about a controversial issue, i.e. quality indicators, and to develop objective instruments aimed at determining such quality. In this regard, citation indexing has become a valuable tool for the bibliometric analysis of scientific information production and consumption by both research institutions and professionals, particularly in disciplines integrated within pure, experimental and applied sciences, and also an instrument to measure the quality of the journals.

The most well-known and used indexes, which allow us to analyse the use of scientific information by scientific communities, are those produced by the ISI of Philadelphia. The impact factor in the Journal Citation Report of the ISI has become a point of reference in research and a tool upon which numerous speciality evaluation exercises are based in many countries that use it to assess their researchers, as is the case with Spain.

According to some authors, the publications included in ISI databases make up the mainstream. However, ISI databases (SCI, SSCI, AHCI and JCR) universally used in bibliometric studies have some drawbacks, such as the bias towards Anglo-Saxon journals and journals written in English. This information system does not really consider journals from countries whose language is not English. Basically, this type of studies obtain exhaustive reference materials of the citations generated by the scientific papers to be studied, within a specific time and space framework. As proposed by Garfield [1], the most logical system to conduct really exhaustive citation analyses is the creation of citation indexes based on the publications in specific disciplines and geographic areas, limiting the conclusions of the indicators to that perfectly defined framework.

Numerous authors [2–5] have pointed out the wrong use of ISI databases in handling bibliometric indicators drawn from them and ignoring Garfield’s warnings on the importance of time and space in citation analysis as well as the danger in considering such indicators absolute values, overlooking their real meaning and the links with other values needed to interpret them correctly. Possibly for that reason, in recent years some countries have launched initiatives aimed at proposing alternative citation indexes and so enhance the visibility and quality of their journals, for they think that they are underrepresented in the databases. Among such initiatives are some projects started by countries like China, with its own citation indexes (Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index and Chinese Science Citation Database) [6, 7] or Latin America, with Iberindex: Índice Iberoamericano de evaluación de publicaciones científicas [8].

Also in Spain since 1992 has also taken some initiatives for the creation of specialised citation indexes in different disciplines or scientific areas, for instance: Índice de citas e Indicadores Bibliométricos de Revistas Españolas de Medicina Interna y sus especialidades [9, 10], Índice de Citas en español en Documentación-Incipsi,


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Índice de citas de revistas españolas de psicología [11] – Modernitascitas, Base de citas de historia moderna [12] – Citaedem, Índice de citas en economía de la empresa [13] and, more recently, In-recs: Índice de impacto de las revistas españolas de ciencias sociales [14] and Fip: factor de impacto potencial de las revistas médicas españolas.

From all these indexes there are two that should be commented more deeply, since they are multidisciplinary citation indexes that offer the same indicators and calculate the journal’s impact factor, following the same criteria as JCR of ISI data base. It is In-recs and FIP indexes.

In-recs is a bibliometric index that provides statistics based on the count of biblio-graphical citations in order to determine the relevance, influence and scientific impact of Spanish social science journals, of the authors that publish papers in them, and of the institutions they are ascribed to. Likewise, it allows to determine, in an individualised way, the citations that the papers published in Spanish journals get, which in turn allows to ascertain the real impact they have on the target scientific community.

In-recs feeds on the systematic indexing of the references cited in the papers published by a selection of Spanish journals from major social science disciplines (Anthropology, Librarianship and Documentation, Political Science and Administration Science, Communication, Economics, Education, Geography, Sociology, Psychology, and Town Planning).

The FIP (Factor de Impacto Potencial) database’s aim is to determine the national and international impact factor of Spanish biomedical journals based on a selection of a hundred journals from different disciplines in the biomedical area.

Discussion and results

When we compare the coverage of the multidisciplinary indexes of Spanish journals offering the impact factor as in the ISI (In-recs and FIP) with the JCRs of the ISI, we see that out of the 3,004 journals published in Spain at present [15], only 1.06% (32 journals) are included in the JCR databases of the ISI (SCI and SCI). But it is striking that the number of Spanish journals in In-recs only accounts for 3.66% (110 journals) of the total production of Spanish journals and in FIP for 3.29% (99 journals).

Table 1 shows the titles of the Spanish journals simultaneously present in the JCR databases of the ISI (SSCI and SCI) and in some of the Spanish citation indexes (In-recs and FIP) for the period 2001–2005. The total number of journals is 16, which only accounts for 0.53% of the total production of journals in Spain. Please note that out of those 16 Spanish journals included in the databases, 5 are published in English and all of them belong to biomedical science disciplines except for the journal Psycothema, a psychology journal in the Social Sciences group. On the other hand, the journal The European Journal of Psychiatry is included in the JCR of the SSCI but not in the JCR of the SCI.



Table 1. List of Spanish journals in the JCR (SSCI and SCI), In-recs and FIP in the period 2001–2005

Journals FIP IN-RECS JCR of the SCI

JCR of the SSCI

Actas Españolas de Psiquiatría X X Archivos de Bronconeumología X X Enfermedades Infecciosas y Microbiología Clínica X X European Journal of Psychiatry X X Histology and Histopathology X X International Journal of Developmental Biology X X Journal of Physiology and Biochemistry X X Medicina Clinica X X Methods and Findings in Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology X X Nefrología X X Neurocirugía X X Neurología X X Psicothema X X Revista Clinica Española X X Revista Española de Cardiología X X Revista Española de Enfermedades Digestivas X X

Table 2. Impact factor comparison of Spanish journals included in the JCR (SSCI and SCI), In-recs and FIP in the period 2001–2005

2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

Journals JCR FIN JCR FIN JCR FIN JCR FIN JCR FIN

Actas Esp Psiquiatri 0.272 0.316 0.256 0.272 0.339 0.237 0.241 0.250 0.286 0.205

Archivos Bronconeumol – 0.732 – 0.455 0.885 0.700 0.995 0.995 1.401 1.293

Enferm Infec Micr Cl – 0.351 – 0.372 0.869 0.522 1.000 1.300 0.905 1.027

Eur J Psychiat 0.167 0.037 0.154 0.000 0.125 0.020 0.250 0.045 0.018 0.035

Histol Histopathol 1.859 0.152 1.881 0.122 1.830 0.150 1.931 0.138 2.023 0.222

Int J Dev Biol 1.650 – 1.465 – 1.306 – 1.888 0.082 2.051 0.071

J Physiol Biochem 0.639 0.098 0.696 0.066 0.564 0.222 0.758 0.258 0.934 0.441

Med Clin (Barcelona) 0.837 0.891 0.854 0.962 1.018 1.210 1.005 1.297 1.074 1.346

Method Find Exp Clin 0.644 0.063 0.489 0.05 0.456 0.109 0.613 0.021 0.798 0.042

Nefrología 0.477 0.365 0.513 0.455 0.437 0.263 0.390 0.301 0.466 0.294

Neurocirugía 0.130 0.130 0.244 0.189 0.202 0.089 0.299 0.227 0.232 0.150

Neurología – 0.366 – 0.242 0.642 0.409 0.752 0.52 0.571 0.414

Psicothema 0.184 0.317 1.098 1.162 0.408 0.562 0.558 0.745 0.874 1.014

Rev Clin Esp 0.277 0.268 0.340 0.348 0.257 0.308 0.287 0.465 0.273 0.442

Rev Esp Cardiol 0.700 0.719 0.941 0.937 0.959 0.848 1.802 1.810 1.769 1.900

Rev Esp Enferm Dig 0.600 0.584 0.594 0.395 0.348 0.205 0.593 0.415 0.535 0.305


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A comparison between the impact factor of the Spanish journals in the JCRs of the ISI with the impact factor of the Spanish journals included in the citation databases of Spain over the past five years is interesting (see Table 2). Contrarily to what one would assume, in general, the journals reach higher impact factor scores in the ISI citation indexes than in the Spanish ones. The only exception is the journal Psicothema, which scores higher in the Spanish citation index (In-recs) throughout the five-year period than in the JCR of the SSCI. The reason of this result is due to the number of self-citations in this journal and that the number of psychology journals in In-recs data base is 21 while in the ISI data base are 2, one of them been Psicothema. In general terms, Spanish journals published in English have a much higher impact factor at international level (JCR) than at national one in national impact indexes (FIN), that is, the impact factor provided by In-recs or FIP.

Once again, all this data confirm that the determination of the best scientific journals not only in a discipline or speciality but also in a country is a very complex task and that quality is a multidimensional concept that can hardly be expressed by a single indicator.

References

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some aspects of citation indexes in spain: a comparative analysis

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