Page 199 - Becoming Metric Wise

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Journal Citation Analysis

tend to become longer, there are more journals that increase their
impact factor than journals that show a decrease.
• Librarians.
Impact factors may be an element in buying or deselection deci-
sions. Yet, for two reasons impact factors are not that important for
librarians. First, impact factors are related to global use and impor-
tance, but librarians must work for local researchers and students.
Local use may be considerably different from global use, language
being one factor. Secondly, big publishing companies propose large
packets (so-called big deals) and it is difficult to change their content.
• Librarians new style and research administrators.
˚
Astro ¨m and Hansson (2013) point out that in many countries,
especially in Scandinavian countries, librarians organize bibliometric
activities as a way to redefine their role within the university and
increase their status. Informing users, i.e., researchers, about biblio-
metric indicators, such as the JIF, and their use for research evaluation
is one aspect, while actually providing bibliometric analyses as back-
ground for evaluations and funding policies is another one. Other
universities have created special functions, say research administrators,
to perform these tasks.
• Authors who want to know the top journals or rising stars in their
field. Sometimes evaluation committees make a difference between
publishing in journals with a high impact factor, a medium one or a
journal not included in the WoS. Let us already say that comparing
actual received citations with a benchmark value in the same field
would be much better (whatever the venue in which the article is
published), and actually reading the article and making up one’s own
mind would be better still (assuming the member of the evaluation
committee is an expert in this particular field).
• Some scientists, in particular informetricians.
For them indicators, such as impact factors are a form of measure-
ment. Results inform about relations within the network of academic
journals. Studying correlations between rankings based on different
indicators is one aspect of such studies.

6.18 RANKING JOURNALS (ROUSSEAU ET AL., 2015;
XU ET AL., 2015)

Once an indicator has been constructed, journals can be ranked according
to this indicator. Yet, using bibliometric indicators is not the only possible