Citation Performance of Malaysian Scholarly Journals in the Web of Science, 2006–2010

Abstract

There are several ways for the international scientific community to recognize the quality of a scholarly journal. Although controversial, the most widely used and reliable methodology to identify the importance of a journal is through the citation it receives. This paper identifies the performance of scholarly journals published by Malaysian publishers in the Web of Science and reports the number of citations to Malaysian journals in terms of the cited and the citing journals. A search using the Thomson-Reuters citation database (Web of Science) was performed to identify highly cited Malaysian journals from 2006 to 2010. We identified 212 cited journals that received 9675 cited-papers, and a total of 9427 articles contributing to the 3184 journals citing Malaysian journals. More than fifty percent of all the articles that cited Malaysian journals were published in journals ranked in the first or second quartile by the Journal Citation Report. Further analysis was done on the top 50 cited and citing journal titles. A steady growth of citations with a total increase of 56.9% was evident between the five year period examined.

In competition with ISI: the perceptions of chief editors of Malaysian local journals

“…For example, it is estimated that WoS only covers 10% of the world's scholarly production, which demonstrates what a slim chance small journals (especially those working with ethnic languages) from small countries have of inclusion. 2,20 From this, it seems vital for countries such as Malaysia to develop their own individual approaches to judging the performance of national journals rather than relying on international citation data (WoS). In this respect, they can use the experiences of other countries, such as Australia, India, and Iran, who determined that their local journals should be given status with regard to assessing academic quality.…”

“…2 It is noteworthy that only 29 out of 51 indexed titles come from Malay public and private universities. 18 In 2006 Zakaria and Rowland 17 conducted an investigation to determine the main reasons Malaysian scholars gave for publishing.…”

“…It has been observed that the core role and functions of scientific journals in the pre-digital era have gradually and systematically improved over time. 3 However, only the medium and attitude have changed, not the mission and goal. The role of the scientific journal remains to serve as the platform for validating the quality of research, communicating and distributing information as well as building a virile scientific community.…”

“…Consequently, Malaysian universities (especially the five top universities which have been designated as research universities to focus on innovation, research, and innovation) mandated their academics to publish only in journals indexed by the Web of Science in order to fulfill MOHE criteria and achieve academic legitimacy. 2 Furthermore, universities revised their previous strategies and established new ones that use the number of academics who have published articles in ISI-indexed journals as a measure against which budgets for scholars, hiring, renewal of contract, and promotion of academics will depend. Therefore, Malaysian scholars now prioritize submission of papers to high-ranked journals, leading local journals to receive fewer good-quality papers -a trend that challenges their existence.…”

Teaching the Dragon? The Diffusion of European Union’s Social and Employment Policies to China

“…Only four non-American cities (i.e., London, Cambridge, and Oxford in the UK as well as Tokyo) are on the list. Several Asian countries, such as China, Singapore, and South Korea, are regarded as new global powers of higher education measured by their scholarly outputs(Jarnecic et al 2008;Mukherjee 2010; National Science Foundation 2012;Shin 2012;Abrizah et al 2013). Despite the rising importance of Asia in the global knowledge economy, the world's most influential researchers continue to display a highly concentrated spatial pattern (see Fig.5.3).…”