| Abstract: |
This paper examines the issue of coercive journal self-citations and the
practical use¬fulness of two recent journal performance metrics, namely the
Eigenfactor score, which may be interpreted as measuring “Journal Influence”,
and the Article Influence score, using the Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Science
(hereafter ISI) data for 2009 for the 200 most highly cited journals in each
of the Sciences and Social Sciences. The paper also compares the two new
bibliometric measures with two existing ISI metrics, namely Total Citations
and the 5-year Impact Factor (5YIF) (including journal self-citations) of a
journal. It is shown that the Sciences and Social Sciences are different in
terms of the strength of the relationship of journal performance metrics,
although the actual relationships are very similar. Moreover, the journal
influence and article influence journal performance metrics are shown to be
closely related empirically to the two existing ISI metrics, and hence add
little in practical usefulness to what is already known, except for
eliminating the pressure arising from coercive journal self-citations. These
empirical results are compared with existing results in the bibliometrics
literature. |