Citation Analysis as a Tool in Journal Evaluation

As a communications system, the network of journals that play a paramount role in the exchange of scientific and technical information is little understood. Periodically since 1927, when Gross and Gross published their study (1) of references in 1 year’s issues of the Journal of the American Chemical Socie/y, pieces of the network have been illuminated by the work of Bradford (2), Allen (3), Gross and Woodford (4), Hooker (5), Henkle (6), Fussier (7), Brown (8), and others (9). Nevertheless, there is still no map of the journal network as a whok. To date, studies of the network and of the interrelation of its components have been limited in the number of journak, the areas of scientific study, and the periods of time their authors were able to consider, Such shortcomings have not been due to any lack of purpose, insight, or energy on the part of investigators, but to the practical difficulty of compiling and manipulating manually the enormous amount of necessary data. A solution to this problem of data is available in the data base used to produce the Science Citation Index ( SCI ) (10). The coverage of the SCI is international and multidisciplinary; it has grown from 600 journals in 1964 to 2400 journals in 1972, and now includes the world’s most important scientific and technical journals in mow disciplines. The SCI is published quarterly and is cumulated annually and quinquennially, but the data base from which the volumes are compiled is maintained on magnetic tape and is updated weekly. At the end of 1971, this data base contained more than 27 mi[tion references to about 10 million different published items. These references appeared over the past decade in the footnotes and bibliographies of more than 2 million journal articles, communications, letters, and so on. The data base is, thus, not only multidisciplinary, it covers a substantial period of time and, being in machine-readable form, is amenable to extensive manipulation by computer. In 1971, the Institute for Scientfic Information (1S1) decided to undertake a systematic analysis of journal citation patterns across the whole of science and technology. It began by extracting from the data base all references pobIished during the last quarter of 1969 in the 2200 journals then covered by the SCL The resultant sample was about 1 million citations of journals, books, reports, theses, and so forth. To test whether this 3-month sample was representative of the year as a whole, it was matched against another sample made by selecting every 27th reference from the approximately 4 million references collected over the entire year. The two samples were similar enough in scope (number of diflerent items cited) and detail (relative frequency of their citation by different journals) to