The new Scopus CiteScore formula and the Journal Impact Factor: a look at top ranking journals and middle ranking journa
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EDITORIAL
The new Scopus CiteScore formula and the Journal Impact Factor: a look at top ranking journals and middle ranking journals in the Scopus categories of General Physics and Astronomy, Materials Science, General Medicine and Social Sciences Jamie V. Trapp1
© Australasian College of Physical Scientists and Engineers in Medicine 2020
Abstract In June 2020 Elsevier announced that the CiteScore metric of journals underwent a change. This work examines the effect of these changes for 40 journals, chosen from the top five and middle five (ranked by CiteScore) journals in the subject areas of General Physics and Astronomy, Materials Science, Medicine, Social Sciences) and compares to the Journal Impact Factor. It is shown that in the data studied here, the new methodology is less susceptible to influence of the proportion of editorial material in a journal, but tends to favour journals in research fields that publish articles which get cited more quickly. Keywords Bibliometrics · Scientometrics · Citescore · Journal impact factor · Jif · Citations · Library and information services · Clarivate analytics · Scopus · Journal based metric
Introduction
Methodology
In June 2020 Elsevier announced that the CiteScore metric of journals has changed [1]. The new CiteScore counts only certain types of documents (articles, conference papers, book chapters, and data papers) in both the numerator and denominator where previously the numerator counted citations to all documents. It also displays a longer citation window in the numerator of 4 years instead of 1 year [1, 2]. This leads to a greater difference between the Scopus CiteScore and the Journal Impact Factor. Previous studies have examined the difference between the two metrics [3], however with the revised CiteScore there may be significant changes in the correlation. This editorial examines the new CiteScore and some effects of the changes.
The Scopus database was accessed to obtain all data except for the Journal Impact Factor (which was sourced from Journal Citation Reports). Several subject areas were selected to represent a range of publishing norms in contemporary research. In each Scopus subject area examined, the five top ranking journals were selected, along with a representative five middle ranking journals, as shown in Table 1. The method of selection of the middle five journals slightly varied between categories, for example in General Physics and Astronomy the five journals with a CiteScore of 2.0 were selected (48th and 49th percentile), for Materials Science the journals at the 50th percentile were selected. In General Medicine the 50th percentile journals with CiteScore 0.8 were selected, but none of these appeared on the Journal Citation Reports database. Due to the fact that the 75th percentile of General Medicine in Scopus was the lowest percentile that returned five consecutively ranked journals that also appeared on Journal Citation Reports, it was determined that comparing the 50th percentile without an Impact Factor was more consistent with
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