I am conducting a study on the contributions of indexing and abstracting services to the visibility and impact of engineering peer-reviewed journals. I would like to respectfully request your views on the Inspec Database, managed by the Institution of Engineering and Technology. Is it currently relevant as a visibility and impact tool to engineering journal editors?
Hello César,
Your study is very interesting and important - for the journal editors and the authors as well. Is it the Inspec Database case study?
My answer does not exactly correspond with the visibility and impact. However, I would like to highlight that there are different aspects of making decisions. I would like to share some facts about an importance of the Inspec Database for the journal editors who participate in journals evaluation in Poland.
The Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Poland evaluates and gives points for journals according to a given criteria. One of these criterion is journal indexing in the selected databases - the Inspec Database for instance. As we can see, sometimes, it might be a completely different journal editor's motivation - not the desire to increase the visibility (to help the authors), but to meet the requirements of the assessment. Of course, no matter what was the motivation, it might be helpful in increasing visibility of the journal, authors and papers.
Dear Magdalena,
I thank you very much for your kind and helpful reply.
Indeed, in Colombia there is a research assessment governmental institution (Colciencias) in charge of such aspects of the scientific publishing activities of universities, research groups and journals.
Inspec was until last year recognized as an indexing and abstracting system which validated the labor of journal editors when a journal was indexed in such database. It meant a quality category upgrade for journals to index their content in that database.
This year things changed and Inspec has, so to put it, "ceased to exist" to Colciencias.
Such fact disquiets me because I thought Inspec was a prestigious engineering database which helped editors and authors in making visible their articles. Why has been Inspec "downgraded"? Are there any reasons why Inspec should not be considered a valid indexing and abstracting system for engineering journal editors?
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