Multidimensional Journal Evaluation: Analyzing Scientific Periodicals beyond the Impact Factor

Citation

Jacso, P. (2013), "Multidimensional Journal Evaluation: Analyzing Scientific Periodicals beyond the Impact Factor", Online Information Review, Vol. 37 No. 4, pp. 662-663. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-05-2013-0117

Journal evaluation has become more important than ever because the assessment of the quantity and quality of researchers, research groups, departments and universities is increasingly based not only on how much they publish, but also on where they have published and in which journals their publications have been cited. The skyrocketing journal subscription costs also make journal evaluations more essential. The book discusses journal evaluation from five angles (output, content, perception/usage, citations, and journal management. These chapters are very well structured, each ending with a summary and a list of references. This multidimensional approach is an appropriate complement to the increasingly dominant metrics‐based and often robotic evaluation of journals, which I call “robometrics”.

The discussion is clear (even if the author's mother tongue is presumably German, not English), objective and convincing, and is exceptionally well supported by the excellent figures, illustrations and tables using the same set of 45 journals on solid‐state physics. Very few of the 132 figures and 72 tables are overcrowded, making the text very difficult to decipher, such as the map of science based on similarity of 220 subject categories in Figure 3.5. It could be very helpful to make available on the web some of the densest original graphs which certainly were produced initially in colour. The content is comprehensive; the only issue that would have deserved some more discussion is the set of the h‐index derivatives

The author, who was awarded the Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Scholarship in 2011, is familiar with both the traditional and the current literature, which she cites impeccably at the right place and the right time for further information, facilitated by a summary and a reference list after each section. I was more than a little envious while reading the book, as I have spent much of my research time in the past 25 years with journal rankings based on expert opinion and bibliometric/scientometric data. This is an outstanding book, strongly recommended for researchers, educators, doctoral students and journal editors.