Open Access
Subscription Access
Measuring Scientific Value of Indian Journals Beyond Impact Factor:A Case with Physics–Chemistry–Biology Journals
Qualitative scientific journals play a vital role in scholarly communication processes. However, during the last few years, there is a mushroom growth of journals in every discipline in India. There has been no single source of systematic advice on how to measure the scientific value of Indian journals. The present study is an attempt to minimize the gap by developing a mechanism for measuring scientific value of Indian journals. Consulting various international databases and their journal inclusion policy, a viable mechanism has been devised and tested with 100+ Indian journals in the fields of physics, chemistry and biology. The results indicate that although the quantity of yearly additions of new journals in each of the three disciplines is quite impressive, the yearly discontinuation is also alarming. Almost 29% of physics journals, 11% of chemistry journals and 21% of biology journals were stopped within a year. Although irregularity in publication, improper execution of review process, non-disclosure of article processing charges, lower percentage of foreign contributors and low citation rate were identified as some drawbacks with Indian physics, chemistry and biology journals. The percentage of predatory journals in these three disciplines is quite less till date. In order to choose a better platform of scholarly publishing, this study suggests some recommendations for prospective authors.
Keywords
Scientific Value – Indian Journals, Scholarly Journal Publishing – India, Status of PCB Journal – India.
User
Font Size
Information
- Sohail, S., Of predatory publishers and spurious impact factors. J. Colle. Phys. Surg. Pak., 2014, 24(8), 537–538.
- Guedon, J., In Oldenburg’s long shadow: Librarians, research scientists, publishers, and the control of scientific publishing. Presentation to the May 2001 meeting of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL); 2001; http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/138/guedon.html.
- Schafner, A. C., The future of scientific journals: lessons from the past. Inf. Technol. Lib., 1994, 13, 239–247.
- Goldreich, O., The Current Role of Journals (online) Essays and Opinions by OdedGoldreich, 2003; http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/on-journals.html
- Guedon, J.-C., The ‘Green’ and ‘Gold’ roads to open access: the case for mixing and matching. Ser. Rev., 2004, 30(4), 315–328.
- Arms, William Y., What are the alternatives to peer review? Quality control in scholarly publishing on the web. J. Electron. Publ., 2002, 8(1); doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/ 3336451.0008.103.
- Coley, T., Chronological dependence. Rhetoric Rev., 2008, 27(3), 325–327.
- Guthrie, K. M., What Do Faculty Think of Electronic Resources. (online) ALA Annual Conference Participants’ Meeting, 2001; http://www.jstor.org/about/faculty.survey.ppt
- Straumsheim, Carl, Predatory’ Publishing Up, 2015; https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/10/01/study-finds-huge-increase-articles-published-predatory-journals
- Beall, J., Predatory publishers are corrupting open access. Nature, 2012, 489, 179.
- Shen, C. and Bjork, B.-C., Predatory’ open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics. BMC Med., 2015, 13, 230; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26423063.
- Butler, D., Sham journals scam authors. Nature, 2013, 495, 421–422.
- Kolata, G., For Scientists, an Exploding World of PseudoAcademia, 2013; http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-exploding-world-of-pseudoacademia.html
- Beall, J., Scholarly Open Access, 2016 (online) available at: http://scholarlyoa.com.
- Lakhotia, S. C., ‘National’ versus ‘International’ journals. Curr. Sci., 2013, 105, 287–288.
- Lakhotia, S. C., Predatory journals and academic pollution. Curr. Sci., 2015, 108(8), 1407–1408.
Abstract Views: 399
PDF Views: 99