CITES: Journals of the Century, various disciplines

[Gretchen Whitney]

Journals of the Century in " The Serials Librarian"  vol. 39(3): p.41-145
(2001)

The editor comments about the series below the citations.

Almost all rely on SSCI or SCI Journal Citation Reports in one way or
another. So I have simply listed the authors and the fields they cover and
suggest readers contact them at the email
addresses provided. (EG)

P.41-56 Dan E. Burgard (Psychology):dburgard at hsc.unt.edu

p. 57-67 Lynne Rudasill (Sociology): rudasil at uiuc.edu

p. 69-77 James W. Williams (Social Work): jamesww&uiuc.edu

p.79-94 Thomas E. Nisonger (Political Science & Intl Relations)

p.95-102 Nancy P. O'Brien (Education) : n-obrien at uivc.edu

p.103-132 Alan Karass (Music) Holy Cross College : akarass at holycross.edu

p.133-145 Lucretia W. McClure (Medicine and
Surgery): lmcl at db1.cc.rochester.edu


Editor: Antony Stankus (tstankus at holycross.edu)

The editor comments:

First, thank you for taking note of the "Journals of the Century" series
of papers within the Serials Librarian. The fourth issue should be out
within the next  month, after which the papers will be reissued with some
indexes and tabular material in print and a comprehensive index on the
web, at a permanent site  to be maintained by the publisher. (Manuscript
indexes in 12 point type total over 480 pages!).

While I had no extensive published comment on the use of SCI or
SSCI or A&HCI and any related JCR volumes by other authors within this
series, I wish to confirm Gene Garfield's observation that JCR related
information was a tremendous aid in my own paper on Basic Science
journals, and very likely greatly informed the work of those doing the
Engineering and Computer Science, Clinical Medicine and Surgery, Pharmacy
and Allied Health Science, and Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine
installments. It was not an absolute and sole determinant (a practice
that I suspect Dr. Garfield himself would feel rather unsophisticated and
inappropriate) but was never far from my decision-making or rank-ordering
process. Most of the reason for avoiding a straight line impact factor or
gross cite ranking approach concerned historical nuance. For example, in
my own work, I sometimes moved up a title within a subject niche, even if
it was no longer one of the top three in impact factor in  its field
currently, because that journal had a pioneering role and influence that
endured. A case in point:  Biochimicia et Biophysica Acta is not
necessarily the first, second, or third  highest impact journal of
Biochemistry, but its pioneering role in opening up  manuscript
submissions to scientists from many different countries, including both
those without a resident national journal of biochemistry, and those with
such a national journal, but without a ready alternative outlet, deserved
special mention. Likewise the Zeitschrift fuer Angewandte Mathematik und
Mechanik may not rack up the cites today that the SIAM family of journals
or the Communications on Mathematical Physics do, but ZAMM definitely
provided a model where applied mathematicians, physicists, and engineers
found common ground decades before any of those other fine journals
existed. Moreover, I have always used the "Cited by" and "Cited in" data
to confirm underlying emphases or flavors within disciplines.

I suspect that the Social Sciences papers used the SSCI to an
intermediate degree, and it should be noted particularly that Tom
Nisonger is a very thoughtful writer on citation-based decision making.


I have no firm data, but suspect that most of the humanities journals
were not written up with close reference to published citation analyses
in most cases.