Tag: Scopus

Determinants of citation impact

Put together, formal parameters other than journal impact – such as the brevity of an article’s title – turned out to be stronger citation predictors.

Guest blog post by Jürgen Dengler

“What makes a paper successful?” is something authors would like to know when submitting a manuscript and editors when deciding on the acceptance of papers.

One answer is: “Write an exciting paper on a relevant topic with up-to-date methods”.

While this is certainly true, most authors feel that this is not the whole truth. The enormous efforts some authors invest in getting their paper accepted in a “high-rank” journal reflect the belief that the publication venue influences the scientific impact of a paper. Other authors spend quite some time in finding a “fancy” title for their contribution.

But do such “formal” aspects actually influence the impact of articles and, if so, to which degree and which are the most relevant ones?

Astonishingly, there is very little published evidence on these aspects.

Thus, I conducted an empirical study using my own publication output over the years. With almost 200 papers in over 50 indexed journals, it already allows some generalisations. With the three IAVS journals, Journal of Vegetation Science, Applied Vegetation Science and Vegetation Classification and Survey, being among the preferred outlets, the journal portfolio is probably also quite similar to that of other IAVS members.

As a common currency for citation impact, I used the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), provided by the Scopus database. While the absolute number of citations is not suitable for a meaningful comparison between papers as the number of citations always increases with time since publication, FWCI standardised citations compared to all articles published in the same year in the same subject field and as the same article type (e.g. research article vs. review article).

A FWCI of 1 means that an article is cited as much as the average, a FWCI of 2 refers to twice as many citations as an average article, etc. Scopus also provides a corresponding measure to FWCI at the journal level, namely the Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), which essentially is the mean of the FWCI values of all papers in that journal in the respective period.

According to the multiple regression analysis, journal impact (SNIP) was the strongest predictor of the article impact.

However, alone it explained only 26.8% of the variance while other formal parameters together explained 31.5% of the variance.

Among those, the brevity of the title was most influential. Each word less in the title led to 9% more citations.

Further, both article length and author number had a positive influence on citations.

Publishing in a special feature increased the citation rate by 43%.

By contrast, open access or formulating titles as questions or factual statements did not significantly influence citation rates.

In conclusion, selecting a high-impact journal has less influence on the article impact than many people believe – the citation impact of different articles in one journal typically varies more than the mean citation impact between different journals.

For authors, the easiest way to increase the impact of a given article is to shorten the title as much as possible.

Caption: Variation of the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) values of articles in journals represented by at least five articles in the analysed sample, with box height proportional to the number of included papers. All three IAVS journals were well represented. The variation of citation impact within individual journals was very large (note the log-scale of the x-axis). For example, the best cited articles of the author in JVS, AVS and VCS all had a considerably better citation performance than the single Nature paper co-authored by the author (FWCI = 3.70).

Associated journal article:

Dengler J (2024) Determinants of citation impact. Vegetation Classification and Survey 5: 169-177. https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.126956.

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Originally published on the Vegetation Science Blog: Official blog post of the IAVS journals.

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You can follow the Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS) journal on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.

Vegetation Classification and Survey featured by Web of Science four years after its launch

Vegetation Classification and Survey will soon receive its very first Journal Impact Factor.

Only four years after the inaugural editorial by Prof Dr Florian Jansen, Dr Idoia Biurrun, Prof Dr Jürgen Dengler and Dr Wolfgang Willner that officialised the third and still youngest scientific journal of the International Association of Vegetation Science (IAVS), the Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS) journal successfully completed the rigorous quality and integrity assessment at Web of Science (WoS).

Late May 2024 saw the whole content ever published in VCS added to the Core Collection of the renowned academic platform, further boosting its discoverability, accessibility and reliability to researchers and other stakeholders alike, confirms the Indexing team of Pensoft and the ARPHA scholarly publishing platform.

“Many thanks to IAVS as owner and Pensoft as publisher, who made this success story possible. However, most of all, this early inclusion into the Web of Science Core Edition is due to the good articles of our authors and the great volunteer service our Associate Editors, Guest Editors, Linguistic Editors, Editorial Review Board members, and other reviewers did and do for VCS,”

the Chief Editors comment on the latest success.

The news means that VCS is soon to receive its very first Journal Impact Factor (JIF): allegedly the most popular and sought after journal-level metric, which annually releases the citation (or “impact”) rate of a given scholarly journal over the last period. By the end of next month, for example, we will know how different journals indexed by WoS have performed compared to each other, based on the number of citations received in 2023 (from other journals indexed by WoS) for papers published in 2021 and 2022 combined.

In 2022, VCS and its all-time publications were also featured by the largest and similarly acclaimed scientific database: Scopus, thus receiving its very first Scopus CiteScore* last June. At 2.0, the result instantly gave a promise of the widely appreciated content published in the journal.

In an editorial, published in the beginning of 2024, the Chief Editors assessed the performance of the journal and analysed the available data from Scopus to predict the citation rates for the journal in the next few years. There, the team also compared the journal’s latest performance with similar journals, including the other two journals owned by the IAVS (i.e. Applied Vegetation Science and Journal of Vegetation Science). Given that as of May 2024 the Scopus CiteScoreTracker for VCS reads 2.5, their optimistic forecasts seem rather realistic.

“The VCS articles of 2023 were on average even better cited than those in Applied Vegetation Science of the same year and had reached about the same level as Journal of Vegetation Science and Biodiversity and Conservation,”

they concluded.

In a recent post, published on the IAVS blog, on behalf of the four VCS Chief Editors, Prof. Dr. Jürgen Dengler further comments on the latest achievements of the journal, while also highlighting particularly valued recent publications.

The team also uses the occasion to invite experts in the field of vegetation science to submit their manuscripts in 2024 to make use of the generous financial support by the IAVS. Given the increasing interest in VCS, the journal also invites additional linguistic editors, as well as reviewers who wish to join the Editorial Review Board.

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Keep yourself updated with news from Vegetation Classification and Survey on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook. You can also follow IAVS on X and join the Association’s public group on Facebook.

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*Note that the Scopus database features a different selection of scientific journals compared to Web of Science to estimate citation metrics. The indexers are also using different formulae, where the former looks into citations made in the last two complete years for eligible papers published in the same years.

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About Vegetation Classification and Survey:

Vegetation Classification and Survey (VCS) is an international, peer-reviewed, online journal on plant community ecology published on behalf of the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS). It is devoted to vegetation survey and classification at any organisational and spatial scale and without restriction to certain methodological approaches.

The scope of VCS is focused on vegetation typologies and vegetation classification systems, their methodological foundation, their development and their application. The journal publishes original papers that develop new typologies as well as applied studies that use such typologies, for example, in vegetation mapping, ecosystem modelling, nature conservation, land use management, or monitoring. Particularly encouraged are methodological studies that design and compare tools for vegetation classification and mapping, such as algorithms, databases and nomenclatural principles, or are dealing with the conceptual and theoretical bases of vegetation survey and classification.

VCS also includes two permanent collections (or sections): “Ecoinformatics” and “Phytosociological Nomenclature”.

About Pensoft:

Pensoft is an independent, open-access publisher and technology provider, best known for its biodiversity journals, including ZooKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal, Phytokeys, Mycokeys, One Ecosystem, Metabarcoding and Metagenomics and many others. To date, the company has continuously been working on various tools and workflows designed to facilitate biodiversity data findability, accessibility, discoverability and interoperability.

About ARPHA Platform:

Pensoft publishes its journals on its self-developed ARPHA publishing platform: an end-to-end, narrative- and data-integrated publishing solution that supports the full life cycle of a manuscript, from authoring to reviewing, publishing and dissemination. ARPHA provides accomplished and streamlined production workflows that can be heavily customised by client journals not necessarily linked to Pensoft as a publisher, since ARPHA is specially targeted at learned societies, research institutions and university presses. The platform enables a variety of publishing models through a number of options for branding, production and revenue models. Alongside its elaborate and highly automated publishing tools and services, ARPHA provides a range of human-provided services, such as science communication and assistance in indexation at databases like Web of Science and Scopus, to provide a complete full-featured publishing solution package.

Scopus CiteScore metrics integrated with Pensoft journals

Having long been indexed by the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature – Scopus, Pensoft journals published on the ARPHA journal publishing platform have now accommodated its latest handy products.

Both Scopus CiteScore and CiteScoreTracker have been integrated with journals published by Pensoft on ARPHA, so that evidence of their impact can be easily provided on a monthly, as well as yearly basis. The metrics are already visible on the homepages of 15 journals published by Pensoft.

Scopus calculates its CiteScore through a simple formula based on the average citations received per document.

The yearly CiteScore is how many times papers published in the previous three years with a single journal are cited in that particular year.

Meanwhile, the CiteScoreTracker provides an estimate on a monthly basis. Since the citation count builds up every month, it is still consistent with the complete year’s score, providing helpful information for a journal’s current performance. Furthermore, it ensures that journals which have only recently been indexed by Scopus are quick to receive their own CiteScore.

To provide an impact estimate as robust and reliable as possible, Scopus CiteScore relies on both the largest database of peer-reviewed literature, and inclusiveness of all publication types. While the latter is necessary in order to acknowledge the scientific value of all academic papers that have found their place in a scholarly journal, it also significantly reduces the risk of metrics manipulation.

To further illustrate the impact of Pensoft publications, a direct citation feed has recently been integrated that shows the number of Scopus citations for a particular publication. Accessible from a tab visible in each publication is a count of scholarly articles that have cited it in Scopus, in addition to previously integrated Crossref, Google Scholar and PubMed.

“Integrating Scopus CiteScore and CiteScoreTracker with all Pensoft journals and potentially with all journals published on ARPHA is what I believe to be of great benefit to all our present and future users, readers and editorial team,” says Pensoft’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev. “It is a fantastic way to keep a real-time track of our progress and impact in the scientific community.”

“We are delighted that Pensoft are including CiteScore metrics on their journal pages. They join a selection of early adopting publishers that recognise the need to provide their users with a range of indicators to better measure the impact of their journals,” says Chris James, Product Manager Research Metrics at Elsevier, who is responsible for CiteScore.