The benefits and drawbacks of impact factor for journal collection management in libraries

Serials Librarian

Volumn 47, Issue 1-2, 2004, Pages 57-75

  Nisonger, Thomas E ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Citation analysis; Impact factor; Journal Citation Reports; Journal collection management; Journal evaluation; Research evaluation

Indexed keywords

EID: 13144289798     PISSN: 0361526X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1300/J123v47n01_04     Document Type: Review

References (72)

1. C. C. Jewett, "Report of the Assistant Secretary Relative to the Library, Presented December 13, 1848," in Third Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution to the Senate and House of Representatives (Washington, D.C.: Tippin and Streeper, 1849), 39-47.
2. P.L.K. Gross and E.M. Gross, "College Libraries and Chemical Education," Science 66 (October 28, 1927): 385-89.
3. Ingo Hackh, "The Periodicals Useful in the Dental Library," Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 25 (September 1936): 109-112.
4. J. K. McNeely and C.D. Crosno, "Periodicals for Electrical Engineers," Science 72 (July 25, 1930): 81-84.
5. Charles F. Dalziel, "Evaluation of Periodicals for Electrical Engineers," Library Quarterly 7 (July 1937): 354-72.
6. P.L.K. Gross and A. O. Woodford, "Serial Literature Used by American Geologists," Science 73 (June 19, 1931): 660-64.
7. Edward S. Allen, "Periodicals for Mathematicians," Science 70 (December 20, 1929): 592-94.
8. Eugene Garfield, "Journal Impact Factor: A Brief Review." Canadian Medical Association Journal 161 (October 19.1999): 979-80. This item is available on the Web as part of a collection of approximately a dozen and a half articles about impact factor, mostly by Garfield, under the title "Essays/Papers on Impact Factor" at URL: http:// www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/impactfactor.html (accesed June 10, 2003).
9. Eugene Garfield, "Journal Impact Factor: A Brief Review." Canadian Medical Association Journal 161 (October 19.1999): 979-80. This item is available on the Web as part of a collection of approximately a dozen and a half articles about impact factor, mostly by Garfield, under the title "Essays/Papers on Impact Factor" at URL: http:// www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/impactfactor.html (accesed June 10, 2003).
10. Eugene Garfield, "Long-term vs. Short-term Journal Impact: Does It Matter?" Scientist 12 (February 2, 1998): 10-12. Also included in "Essays/Papers on Impact Factor."
11. I b i d.
12. Eugene Garfield and Irving H. Sher, "New Factors in the Evaluation of Scientific Literature Through Citation Indexing," American Documentation 14 (July 1963): 195-201.
13. Thomas E. Nisonger, Management of Serials in Libraries (Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1998).
14. From direct examination of the Journal Citation Reports.
15. Wolfgang Glänzel and Henk F. Moed, "Journal Impact Measures in Bibliometric Research," Scientometrics 53 (February 2002): 171-93.
16. This information is readily ascertainable because the LISA database codes each abstract for the original document's language.
17. Graeme Hirst, "Discipline Impact Factor? A Method for Determining Core Journal Lists," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 29 (July 1978: 171-72.
18. Graeme Hirst and Nadia Talent, "Computer Science Journals - An Iterated Citation Analysis," IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication PC-20 (December 1977): 233-38.
19. Chunpei He and Miranda Lee Pao, "A Discipline-specific Journal Selection Algorithm," Information Processing and Management 22, no. 5 (1986): 405-416.
20. Ana M. Ramírez., Esther O. García, and J. Antonio del Río, "Renormalized Impact Factor," Scientometrics 47 (January 2000): 3-9.
21. P. Vinkler, "Evaluation of Some Methods for the Relative Assessment of Scientific Publications." Scientometrics 10, nos. 3-4 (1986): 157-77.
22. R. Srinivasan and others, "Assessment of the Impact of the Journal Literature Produced by Indian CSIR [Council of Scientific and Industrial Research] Laboratories Using Subfield Corrected Impact," Scientometrics 44 (January 1999): 81-92.
23. G. Van Hooydonk and others, "A Bibliotheconomic Analysis of the Impact Factors of Scientific Disciplines," Scientometrics 30 (May 1994): 65-81.
24. Johannes Stegmann, "Building a List of Journals with Constructed Impact Factors," Journal of Documentation 55 (June 1999): 310-24.
25. Paula J. Hane, "The Prestige (Factor) Is Gone," Information Today 19 (May 2002): 1, 51.
26. Péter Jacsó, "Péter's Picks & Pans: Xrefer, Yahoo! Research Documents Collection, Prestige Factor," Online 26 (July/August 2002): 72-75.
27. Gary D. Byrd and Michael E. D. Koenig, "Systematic Serials Selection Analysis in a Small Academic Health Sciences Library," Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 66 (October 1978): 397-406.
28. Dawn Bick and Reeta Sinha, "Maintaining a High-quality, Cost-effective Journal Collection," College and Research Libraries News 52 (September 1991): 485-90.
29. Diane Schmidt, Elisabeth B. Davis, and Ruby Jahr, "Biology Journal Use at an Academic Library: A Comparison of Use Studies," Serials Review 20. no. 2 (1994): 45-64.
30. Betty E. Tucker, "The Journal Deselection Project: The LSUMC-S Experience," Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory 19 (Fall 1995): 313-20.
31. Thomas E. Nisonger, "JASIS and Library and Information Science Journal Rankings: A Review and Analysis of the Last Half-century," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 50 (September 1999): 1004-1019.
32. Thomas E. Nisonger, "Impact Factor-based Ranking of Library and Information Science Journals in the Social Sciences Citation Index Journal Citation Reports," in Fifth International Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Infometrics: Proceedings-1995; ed. by Michael E. D. Koenig and Abraham Bookstein (Medibrd. NJ: Learned Information, 1995), 393-402.
33. James A. Christenson and Lee Sigelman, "Accrediting Knowledge: Journal Stature and Citation Impact in Social Science," Social Science Quarterly 66 (December 1985): 964-75. Also included in "Essays/Papers on Impact Factor."
34. Alan Feingold, "Assessment of Journals in Social Science Psychology," American Psychologist 44 (June 1989): 961-64.
35. Steven Stack, "Measuring the Relative Impacts of Criminology and Criminal Justice Journals: A Research Note," Justice Quarterly 4 (September 1887): 475-84.
36. Harold Colson, "Citation Rankings of Public Administration Journals," Administration & Society 21 (February 1990): 452-71.
37. Thomas E. Nisonger, "A Ranking of Political Science Journals Based on Citation Data," Serials Review 19 (Winter 1993): 7-14.
38. Natalie Schoch and Eileen G. Abels, "Using a Valuative Instrument for Decision Making in the Cancellation of Science Journals in a University Setting," in The Economics of Information: the 1994 ASIS Annual Meeting: Proceedings of the 57th ASIS Annual Meeting; Alexandria, VA, October 17-20, 1994, edited by Bruce Maxian. (Medford, NJ.: published for the American Society for Information Science by Information Today, 1994): 41-50.
39. Rikie Deurenberg, "Journal Deselection in a Medical University Library by Ranking Periodicals based on Multiple Factors," Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 81 (July 1993): 316-19.
40. Steve Black, "An Assessment of Social Sciences Coverage by Four Prominent Full-text Online Aggregated Journal Packages." Library Collections, Acquisitions, & Technical Services 23 (Winter 1999): 411-19.
41. Péter Jacsó. "Evaluating the Journal Base of Databases Using the Impact Factor of the ISI Journal Citation Reports," in National Online Meeting Proceedings 2000: Proceedings of the 21st National Online Meeting, New York, May 16-18, 2000, edited by Martha E. Williams. (Medford, NJ: Information Today, 2000): 169-72.
42. Stephen P. Harter, "The Impact of Electronic Journals on Scholarly Communication: A Citation Analysis," Public-access Computer Systems Review 7, no. 5 (1996). [Electronic Journal.] Available on the Web at URL: http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v7/n5/ hart7n5.html (accessed June 7, 2003).
43. Stephen P. Harter, "Scholarly Communication and Electronic Journals: An Impact Study," 49 (May 1, 1998): 507-16.
44. Michael Fosmire and Song Yu, "Free Scholarly Electronic Journals: How Good Are They?" Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship no. 27 (Summer 2000). [Electronic Journal]. Available on the Web at URL: http://www.istl.org/istl/00-sum-mer/refereed.html (accessed June 6, 2003).
45. Harter, "Scholarly Communications and Electronic Journals."
46. H. H. Barschall and J. R. Arrington, "Cost of Physics Journals: A Survey," Bulletin of the American Physical Society 33 (July-August 1988): 1437-47.
47. Thomas E. Nisonger, "The Relationship between International Editorial Board Composition and Citation Measures in Political Science, Business, and Genetics Journals," Scientometrics 54, no. 2 (2002): 257-68.
48. Eugene Garfield, "What Citalions Tell Us About Canadian Research," Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science 18 (December 1993): 14-35.
49. Helge Clausen and Irene Wormell, "A Bibliometric Analysis of IOLIM [International Online Information Meeting] Conferences. 1977-1999," Journal of Information Science 27, no. 3 (2001): 157-69.
50. Peter Ingwersen, "The Calculation of Web Impact Factors," Journal of Documentation 54 (March 1998): 236-43.
51. Paul H. Ribbe, "Assessment of Prestige and Price of Professional Publications," American Mineralogist 73 (May/June 1988): 449-69.
52. Thomas E. Nisonger, "Use of the Journal Citation Reports for Serials Management in Research Libraries: An Investigation of the Effect of Self-citation on Journal Rankings in Library and Information Science and Genetics," College and Research Libraries 61 (May 2000): 263-75.
53. Blaise Cronin and Kara Overfelt, "Citation-based Auditing of Academic Performance," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 45 (March 1994): 61-72.
54. Nisonger, "Impact Factor-based Ranking of Library and Information Science Journals in the Social Sciences Citation Index Journal Citation Reports."
55. E. Garfield, "Is Citation Analysis a Legitimate Evaluation Tool?" Sciento-metrics 1, no. 4 (1979): 359-75.
56. Ronald Rousseau, "Journal Evaluation: Technical and Practical Issues," Library Trends 50 (Winter 2002): 418-39.
57. . Information provided on June 17, 2003 by Anne Haines of the Indiana University Libraries Reference Department, based on Ulrich's Web version.
58. Garfield, "Journal Impact Factor."
59. I b i d.
60. Stephen P. Harter and Thomas E. Nisonger, "ISI's Impact Factor as Misnomer: A Proposed New Measure to Assess Journal Impact," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 48 (December 1997): 1147-1148.
61. Nelson C. Dometrius, "Subjective and Objective Measures of Journal Stature," Social Science Quarterly 70 (March 1989): 197-203.
62. Christinger Tomer, "A Statistical Assessment of Two Measures of Citation: The Impact Factor and the Immediacy Index," Information Processing and Management 22, no. 2 (1986): 251-58.
63. Garfield, "Long-term vs. Short-term Journal Impact."
64. Rousseau, "Journal Evaluation."
65. "Source Data," in "JCR Glossary," 2002 Journal Citation Reports.
66. Elizabeth Pan, "Journal Citation as a Predictor of Journal Usage in Libraries," Collection Management 2 (Spring 1978): 29-38.
67. Michael D. Cooper and George F. McGregor, "Using Article Photocopy Data in Bibliographic Models for Journal Collection Management," Library Quarterly 64 (October 1994): 386-413.
68. Schmidt, Davis, and Jahr, "Biology Journal Use at an Academic Library."
69. Tony Stankus and Barbara Rice, "Handle with Care: Use and Citation Data for Science Journal Management," Collection Management 4 (Spring/Summer 1982): 95-110.
70. Pan, "Journal Citation as a Predictor of Journal Usage in Libraries."
71. Nisonger, Management of Serials in Libraries
72. Thomas E. Nisonger, "A Methodological Issue Concerning the Use of Social Sciences Citation Index Journal Citation Reports Impact Factor Data for Journal Ranking," Library Acquisitions: Practice & Theory 18 (Winter 1994): 447-58.