Publishing and citing behavior of journals vary across fields. In different fields, different dissemination channel of research activity are preferred, such as in social science books are preferred over journal articles, and in computer science, results are mostly published in conference papers. The number of references per article also vary across disciplines. Similarly, some journals are multidisciplinary, some are open access and some are closed access. Impact factor does not solve the problem of journal comparison across domains. Which metrics and measures or factors could be important in comparing journals in and across the discipline? Reference to any related article will be highly appreciated.
In fact, there are great differences among the disciplines, so that one cannot simply take the number of citations to decide which journals are the most important. Therefore I personally like the Q-Rank of Scimago https://www.scimagojr.com/ , which allows ranking by discipline. Scimago also nicely depicts how individual journal rankings have developed over the years.
This would depend on the purpose of the comparison. What do you have in mind?
Dear Jochen Glaser , I want to compare a journal (Q4 rank) with few other journals (Q1-Q4) of the same category (for the current study) to assess the overall impact of that specific journal, such as to get some insights on what made it fall down, where to move next, etc. I want to analyze its scientometric landscape and emerging trends. I need suggestions regarding assessment of reasons of fall down and future direction and any other to improve it further. In the next study, I intend to compare journals of different categories.
I am still not entirely sure I understand the purpose of the comparison. First of all, I don't think journals have an impact. This works only if we define journals as collections of articles, which does not seem particularly interesting.
If we define journals as communication channels between particular groups of authors and specific audiences, there is a variety of interesting attributes of journals one could compare. On the latter, I contributed to a small paper:
Conference Paper Journals as Communication Channels between National Sub-Communities
Hi,
A good source for comparing journals is the Web of Science JCR. It provides a wealth of information on journals, plus graphical presentations.
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