Comparative Study On Academic Journals Evaluation Between America And China

From the view of bibliometrics, journal evaluation is taking subjective indexes counts and then ranking and evaluating the journals. Comparing to the country, province and city evaluation at macro level, to the university and research institute at the middle level, journal evaluation and researcher evaluation belongs to evaluations at the micro level. But just at this level there are much more problems. Currently, Chinese journal evaluation is developing better in theories, with different emphasis on natural sciences and social sciences, with multi developing trend in practice. However, there are still some shortcomings. America stands out in science and academic journals and its theories and practice in journal evaluation have been the milestone in the world. SCI, SSCI, A&HCI and JCR set up by ISI, which is an American evaluation institute though, their source journals is distributed in the whole world and they have been widely accepted in the world. The mature theories and practice of ISI stand for the most authority level of the journal evaluation in the world. Therefore, on the basis of retrospecting the journal evaluation history, the author tends to know the status quo and the future trend between America and China. It is aiming at better understanding Chinese journal evaluation theories and practice, making up for the deficiency by learning from America’s strong points, making the evaluation perfect and standard, promoting the reasonable competition and healthy development of Chinese journals. Besides the first chapter "Introduction" and the last chapter "Conclusion and forecast", the main body of the dissertation consists of six chapters, which are divided into two parts:the theoretical part from chapter 2 to chapter 4 and the empirical part from chapter 5 to chapter 6.Chapter 1 retrospects the origin, theoretical basis and evolution of journal evaluation. The concept of core journals came up in England in the 1930s and was popular in America in the 1970s. Law of Bradford, Law of Garfiled, Price’s document increase law and obsolescence index make up the theoretical basis of core journal selection. The original core journals was to reveal the distribution rules of document concentrating and scattering and those journals that publish more documents in the field are the core journals. It actually is a statistical evaluation based on the article counts. The emergence of the citation analysis and the use of citation index totally change the understanding of the concept of core journals. The core journals, no more the document distribution rule, but the revelation of the academic value through the cited documents. Hence, the core journals transform from the evaluation on article counts to the evaluation on document quality and academic impact.Chapter 2 introduces the status quo of journal evaluation both in America and China. American journal evaluation system is introduced in details and the comments are given. Chinese academic journal evaluation has experienced the phases of the selection of science journals abroad and the selection of science journals at home, among which, A Guide to the Core Journals of China, A Guide to the Humanities & Social Science Core Journals in China, Chinese Social Science Citation Index, Chinese Science Journal Citation Report, Chinese Science Citation Database, Chinese Academic Journal Citation Report are core journal or source journal selection reports and are expounded. Evaluation on English journals published in China is introduced.Chapter 3 compares the journal evaluation between America and China from the aspects of purpose and function of evaluation, evaluation organization and evaluation object, discipline classification, the evaluation process, qualitative evaluation and quantitative evaluation, core area division and definition of core journal amount, social value and impact, outside environment,2 pairs of concepts comparison. The differences, similarities and the inspiration are studied and discovered.Chapter 4 analyzes the main problems exist in America’s and China’s journal evaluation. The main problems of America’s show as the following: commercialization-oriented; the prejudice toward region and language; imbalance in discipline distribution; prejudice toward ideology in inclusion of humanities and social science. The main problems in China shows as the following: utilitarian-orientation makes the journal evaluation the tool as science management and scientific performance evaluation; over-emphasizing the bibliometrical evaluation method; the evaluation indexes are not so subjective and not keeping close up with the global trend; inaccurate discipline division of the comprehensive journals (including university journals); time lag of evaluation and lack of supervision mechanics; the localization of the evaluation of Chinese humanities and social science journals.Chapter 5 is the construction of discipline classification and grading evaluation of academic journals in the new environment. Evaluation journal displays the international trend in the new academic era. The evaluation object consists of the print journals, e-journals, web journals and the open access journals as well in the near future. The new-emerging indexes of 5-year impact factor, web downloading rate and h-index began to be taken into the evaluation index system. The widespread application of information technology and computer makes the evaluation method and means big change. By the software’s, the researchers can be set free from the arduous search, statistics and computation by hand.From the aspect of bibliometrics, the journals can be divided into the core region, relative region and non-relative region of the specific discipline, according to the amount of articles of the discipline. So the hypothesis can be proposed as:there must be some different grades in the large amount of journals. The discipline division and grading of academic journals can help them locate their position in the discipline and provide reference for the science evaluation and management. The evaluation principle and method is inheriting the education evaluation system by Research Center of Chinese Science Evaluation of Wuhan University (RCCSE). The evaluation standard is formulated and the 5 grades are divided.Chapter 6 is the empirical study of discipline division and grading evaluation of Chinese academic journals. The evaluation process is explained in details. The 12 evaluation journal rankings of disciplines of philosophy, economics, law, education, literature, history, maths, engineering, agriculture, medicine, management and information and library science, the 4 rankings of university journals are listed in the appendix. The discipline distribution, area distribution of Chinese core journals, the inclusion of journals from natural sciences by the important foreign databases, the core impact of comprehensive core journals, the international academic impact and area distribution of English journals published by China have been analyzed respectively.This dissertation is one part of the project of "Chinese academic journal evaluation research" carried out by RCCSE of Wuhan University.