An international comparison of journal publishing and citing behaviours

Abstract

The relationship between researchers" publishing and citing behaviours has received little examination despite its potential importance in scholarly communication, particularly at an international level. To remedy this we studied documents and their references indexed in Thomson Reuters"s Web of Science (WoS) in the period 2000-2009 to compare journal publishing behaviours against journal citing behaviours across the world. The results reveal that most publications in, and citations to, all five quality based strata of journals examined come from scientifically and economically advanced countries. Nevertheless, in proportion to their total number of citations given to WoS journals, it seems that less developed countries cite high-quality journals at the same rate as developed countries and so the poorer publishing of less developed countries does not seem to be due to a lack of access to top journals. Moreover, examining the publishing and citing trends of countries revealed a decreasing rate of high-income and Scientifically Advanced Countries (SACs) publications in, and citations to, all quality ranges of journals in comparison to the increasing rate of publications and citations of other groups. Finally, research cooperation between developed and less developed countries seems to positively influence the publishing behaviour of the latter as their publications coauthored with developed countries were published more often in top journals.

How is open access publishing going down with early career researchers? An international, multi-disciplinary study

“…By the same token, national-culture driven attitudes, social perceptions, preferences and behavioral responses have been shown to bring about diversity in the scholarly communication practices of scholars from different countries, most notably between developed countries at the centre of world science and developing countries, on the periphery of the global scientific enterprise Xu;Nicholas, 2017;Didegah;Thelwall;Gazni, 2012;Haddow;Hammarfelt, 2019;Jamali et al, 2014;Jamali et al, 2020b;Xu et al, 2015). In the specific case of open access publishing, as Guédon (1975) predicted nearly half a century ago, the opportunities afforded by OA for scientists-as-authors often deepen the schism between rich and poor countries.…”

Promotion and Reporting of Research from Resource-Limited Settings

“…Similar trends in the low representation of LAMIC research have been reported in many other health and bio-medical subject areas. 1318 While the general trend has been a parallel and corresponding increase in both the amount of LAMIC research and their representation in international academic publication outlets, the rate of increase, ease of publication, acceptance rates of manuscripts, and especially those solely authored by LAMIC researchers remain significantly low. In addition, a “transatlantic divide” in LAMIC research publishing has been reported.…”

Providing impact: The distribution of JCR journals according to references they contribute to the 2-year and 5-year journal impact factors

“…Didegah et al undertook an international comparison of journal publishing and citing behaviors. They studied documents and their references indexed in Web of Science (WoS) in the period 2000-2009, and compared journal publishing behaviors against journal citing behaviors by scientists from different countries [Didegah, Thelwall, & Gazni, 2012]. In a sample of economics journals, Frandsen presented a method of citation analysis based on multiple linear regression for both cited and citing journals.…”