Definition and identification of journals as bibliographic and subject entities: Librarianship versus ISI Journal Citation Reports methods and their effect on citation measures

Abstract

This paper explores the ISI Journal Citation Reports (JCR) bibliographic and subject structures through Library of Congress (LC) and American research libraries cataloging and classification methodology. The 2006Science Citation Index JCR Behavioral Sciences subject category journals are used as an example. From the library perspective, the main fault of the JCR bibliographic structure is that the JCR mistakenly identifies journal title segments as journal bibliographic entities, seriously affecting journal rankings by total cites and the impact factor. In respect to JCR subject structure, the title segment, which constitutes the JCR bibliographic basis, is posited as the best bibliographic entity for the citation measurement of journal subject relationships. Through factor analysis and other methods, the JCR subject categorization of journals is tested against their LC subject headings and classification. The finding is that JCR and library journal subject analyses corroborate, clarify, and correct each other. The ProblemJournals present complex problems of bibliographic control. Bibliographic control is the process of creating, organizing, managing, and maintaining a file of bibliographic records representing the items held in a library or the sources listed in an index or database to facilitate access to the information in them. It requires standardizing bibliographic description by means of uniform catalog codes, classification systems, name authority files, and preferred headings. In terms of function, bibliographic control can be divided

Profiling leading scientists in nanobiomedical science: interdisciplinarity and potential leading indicators of research directions

“…ISI (Thomson Reuters) assigns journals to SCs based on journal-to-journal citation patterns and editorial judgment. There are arguments concerning the accuracy of these classifications (Pudovkin and Garfield, 2002;Bensman and Leydesdorff, 2009). However, the SCs remain the most widely used and most easily accessible, with assignment errors generally among neighboring SCs.…”

Generating clustered journal maps: an automated system for hierarchical classification

“…For pragmatic reasons, it has been considered “best practice” in evaluation studies to use the WoS Subject Categories (WCs)1 for the operationalization of fields of science even though these categories do not represent homogeneous sets (Leydesdorff and Bornmann 2016). They are attributed to journals by manual indexing and have been elaborated incrementally for more than forty years by the providers of the database (Bensman and Leydesdorff 2009; Pudovkin and Garfield 2002, p. 1113). Journals can be attributed to more than one WC.…”

An evaluation of impacts in “Nanoscience & nanotechnology”: steps towards standards for citation analysis

“…For the delineation of fields of science, scientometricians often turn to journal classification schemes provided by the database producer—such as the WoS Subject Categories of the ( Social ) Science Citation Index (SCI and SSCI) 1. Journals, however, can be assigned to more than a single category, and this categorization is not “literary warranted”; that is, it is not updated systematically to follow the development of the scientific literature (Bensman and Leydesdorff 2009; Chan 1999). …”