Comparing the impact of subfields in scientific journals
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Comparing the impact of subfields in scientific journals Xiomara S. Q. Chacon1 · Thiago C. Silva2,3 · Diego R. Amancio1 Received: 9 March 2020 © Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2020
Abstract The impact factor has been extensively used in the last years to assess journals visibility and prestige. While it is useful to compare journals, the specificities of subfields visibility in journals are overlooked whenever visibility is measured only at the journal level. In this paper, we analyze the subfields visibility in a subset of over 450,000 Physics papers. We show that the visibility of subfields is not regular in the considered dataset. In particular years, the variability in subfields impact factor in a journal reached 75% of the average subfields impact factor. We also found that differences of subfields visibility in the same journal can be even higher than differences of visibility between different journals. Our results show that subfields impact is an important factor accounting for journals visibility. Keywords Citation success · Impact factor · Journal impact · Journal metrics
Introduction In recent years, the visibility of scientific papers, authors, journals and conferences have been used as an important feature to quantify research impact (Waltman 2016). The number of citations has been an important quantity to gauge prestige, and for this reason, many research impact measurements have been devised based on citation counts (Redner 1998). At the author level, for example, the h-index has been widely used as a proxy to scientific visibility (Bornmann and Daniel 2007), despite the many criticisms (Wilhite et al. 2019; Haley 2017; Egghe 2006; Martin 2016). Citations also plays an important role in evaluating journals research output. The prestige of scientific journals is oftentimes measured via citation counts, among other factors (Glänzel and Moed 2002). One important citation index for journals is the impact factor (IF), which essentially gives the average number of citations received by papers in a journal in the last 2 years. In many cases, researchers use journals impact * Diego R. Amancio [email protected] 1
Department of Computer Science, Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of São Paulo, São Carlos, São Paulo, Brazil
2
Universidade Católica de Brasília, Distrito Federal, Brazil
3
Department of Computing and Mathematics, Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences, and Literatures in Ribeirão Preto, University of São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, Brazil
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Scientometrics
factor (and other journal attributes) to identify the most relevant venue to disseminate their research. While the impact factor has been a disseminated index to measure journals visibility, it has been mostly used at the journal level (Alberts 2013). In this sense, differences in the visibility of subfields in the same journal have been mostly overlooked. Consider, for example, a general interest journal, publishing in many different subfields. In a high impact journal, some subfields might hav
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