The Research On Citation Behavior And Evaluation Methods Of Academic Journals

Academic periodicals are important carriers for the preservation and dissemination of academic achievements.Accurate and scientific evaluation of academic journals can help readers choose appropriate materials from multitudinous literatures.It also contributes to the reservation of right journals in the library.Periodical management departments make scientific decisions according to evaluation results.Academic journal quality can be evaluated either by peer review or by citation indicators.Impact factor is most widely used among various journal evaluation indicators.Nevertheless,journal impact factor doesn't take into account the quality of different citing periodicals,and can't reflect the difference of citation peak occurrence time in different subjects.Publication delay will have an impact on citation behavior,and further affect the results of journal evaluation.There will be inherent defects in a single evaluation method.With complementary advantages,the combination of various methods will lead to better results.Thus this thesis concentrates on the improvement of current impact factors,the analysis of the relationship between publication delay and citation behavior,and hybrid approach of periodical quality evaluation,including the following contents:(1)This thesis first summarizes achievements in the field of journal quality evaluation at home and abroad.Then journal evaluation indicators that have great influence are classified and described,and corresponding methods used in evaluating the quality of journals are explained.(2)Because impact factors don't take citing journal's quality into consideration,a new type of impact factor based on h index of journals is proposed.Through citation data from 15 representative mathematical journals we can draw a conclusion that impact factor based on h index makes up this drawback of current impact factor.(3)We focus on the publication interval of cited references in the calculation of impact factors.One of the ways to overcome current impact factor's defects is to enlarge time-span between citation year and publication year.We calculate a number of impact factors whose literatures published in two years and calculate a number of impact factors whose literatures published in one year.Besides,we also calculate impact factors with variable-length publication intervals and choose the maximum ones to represent the periodicals' influence.The citation data of 566 journals in 7 JCR subjects are used for verification.(4)Two typical journals in operation research and optimization field are selected to collect articles' received date and published date from 2008 to 2014.Citation retrieved from SCI database makes it possible to analysis correlation between publication delay and citation.Then articles with short publication delay are separated from the whole documents.The titles and keywords of these papers are analyzed,and the research contents and characteristics of these publications are described.Next the influence of these papers' first authors is described.Through above analysis,we can draw some preliminary conclusions.(5)We put forward a hybrid evaluation approach of academic periodicals.In this section,factor analysis is introduced to reduce the dimension of the evaluation vector and solve the problem of information overlap among some indices.Then the variation of indicators is used for weight adjustment.Finally,we take advantage of technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution to sort journals.A higher consistency is obtained by comparing the results of comprehensive evaluation through hybrid methods and the results of the expert evaluation.