I've always been amazed how Thomson/ISI categorized English language journals (mostly published in de US/UK) as "international journals" and all other journals as "regional journals". Should ask them.
BTW Eric could you elaborate on what you say in your last sentence? Will Science Metrix launch a bibliometrics service based on GS data or do I have to interpret your words in another way? Jeroen [101-innovations-icon-very-small] 101 innovations in scholarly communication<http://innoscholcomm.silk.co/> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jeroen Bosman, faculty liaison for the Faculty of Geosciences Utrecht University Library<http://www.uu.nl/library> email: j.bos...@uu.nl<mailto:j.bos...@uu.nl> telephone: +31.30.2536613 mail: Postbus 80124, 3508 TC, Utrecht, The Netherlands visiting address: room 2.50, Heidelberglaan 3, Utrecht web: Jeroen Bosman<http://www.uu.nl/university/library/en/disciplines/geo/Pages/ContactBosman.aspx> twitter @jeroenbosman/ @geolibrarianUBU profiles: : Academia<http://uu.academia.edu/JeroenBosman> / Google Scholar<http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-IfPy3IAAAAJ&hl=en> / ISNI<http://www.isni.org/0000000028810209> / Mendeley<http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/jeroen-bosman/> / MicrosoftAcademic<http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Author/51538592/jeroen-bosman> / ORCID<http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5796-2727> / ResearcherID<http://www.researcherid.com/ProfileView.action?queryString=KG0UuZjN5WmCiHc%252FMC4oLVEKrQQu%252BpzQ8%252F9yrRrmi8Y%253D&Init=Yes&SrcApp=CR&returnCode=ROUTER.Success&SID=N27lOD6EgipnADLnAbK> / ResearchGate<http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jeroen_Bosman/> / Scopus<http://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.url?authorId=7003519484> / Slideshare<http://www.slideshare.net/hierohiero> / VIAF<http://viaf.org/viaf/36099266/> / Worldcat<http://www.worldcat.org/wcidentities/lccn-n91-100619> blogging at: I&M 2.0<http://im2punt0.wordpress.com/> / Ref4UU<http://ref4uu.blogspot.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Trees say printing is a thing of the past From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Éric Archambault Sent: woensdag 29 april 2015 0:08 To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Number of Open Access journals Jean-Claude has an excellent point. Our current outlook is extremely Western-centric. When I was in SPRU, professors (can't remember if it was Pavitt or Ben Martin) used to joke that bibliometric measurement was highly influenced by the linguistic capacity of housewives in Philadelphia. Though today there might have been a shift towards Manila for data entry, it remains that bibliographic databases present a truncated view of the world, and bibliometrics a distorted, pro-Western/Northern Hemisphere biased view of science. If one can potentially advance the idea that all ground breaking science eventually makes it to Western journals, and that this is what current databases are reflecting, it would still remain that normal science follows similar rules in Russia, Japan, and China and yet a huge part of that content still goes unaccounted for. A normal US or UK paper is not any better than a normal Brazilian, Chinese, or Russian paper yet the former are frequently counted, the latter more frequently not. The low impact of non-Western countries is in part a reflection of the exclusion of journals published in non-English speaking countries, and Jean-Claude is right to say there are thousands of them. The effect on measurement is poisonous because national level self-citations are frequently excluded when journals are not published in English-language journal. If one wants to see the effect of removing national self-citation, try removing them altogether and you'll see how badly clobbered the US ends-up in terms of relate impact. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting to measure that way as it would be unwise (I always advocate the inclusion of self-citations at all levels even though everyone knows some authors and journals are narcissistic and playing the number game - self citations are an essential part of the knowledge-building edifice and excluding them potentially create more problems than it solves), but it is a valid experiment to show how bad the situation currently is because we count only publications from half of the journals published, and that half is anything but randomly selected. For those who want to see the effect, I can send you a table - among countries with 45,000 papers or more, and adjusted for scale, the US ranked 22nd (after Japan, the Czech Republic and Mexico) if only citations from other countries were included. We never published that paper as we thought it was brain damaged to exclude national self-citation. Yet, by excluding many many locally published journals from citation counts, this is what the advanced analytics that come out of dominant bibliographic databases do, and this is a sin that we, bibliometricians, commit every day. Hopefully open access will play a huge role in reducing the distortion field. I can confirm there is more than 50,000 scholarly and scientific journals the world over, not by any measure all open access, but all peer or quality reviewed according to the norms of scholarly and scientific communication in all fields of academia. Stay tuned, more neutral metrics are going to be available in the near future. Eric Archambault From: goal-boun...@eprints.org<mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org> [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Jean-Claude Guédon Sent: April-28-15 9:07 AM To: goal@eprints.org<mailto:goal@eprints.org> Subject: [GOAL] Number of Open Access journals I have repeatedly criticized the numbers of journals used to describe scientific and scholarly publishing in the world. I have also regularly criticized the use of lists such as the Web of Science, Scopus and Ulrich's as being largely centred on the North Atlantic and/or OECD countries.As a counter to such numbers, I have pointed out that Latin America alone, as indicated by the Latindex vetted list, can sport over 6,000 titles. Presumably, if Asia and Africa did the same kind of work, numbers of 25-27,000 titles for the whole world would look funny. Another way to look at this is through disciplines or study areas. No one, I suspect, would argue that Classics (Latin and Greek) is a large speciality in the world of learning. Typically, classics departments are small and tend to disappear. Nonetheless, one can find a list of 1498 journal in this field, and that list is limited to open access journals. http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.ca/2012/07/alphabetical-list-of-open-access.html The list dates from the summer of 2012. There may be a few more or a few less since, but the least one may add is that such a number reveals a publishing activity that reaches well beyond expectations (at least mine). Conclusion: scholarly journal publishing is a lot more complex than what is provided by most scientometric studies. And a final question: who is advantaged by the illusory simplicity of the publishing landscape? -- Jean-Claude Guédon Professeur titulaire Littérature comparée Université de Montréal
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