Johan Bollen, Marko A. Rodriguez, and Herbert Van de Sompel "Journal Status" arXiv:cs.GL/0601030 v1 9 Jan 2006

[Stephen J Bensman]

Stephen J Bensman
03/08/2006 10:39 AM

To:    dgoodman at Princeton.EDU
cc:

Subject:    Re: [SIGMETRICS] Johan Bollen, Marko A. Rodriguez, and Herbert
       Van de Sompel "Journal Status" arXiv:cs.GL/0601030 v1 9 Jan 2006
       (Document link: Stephen J Bensman)

Good point well made, David.  Even the set of review journals is fuzzy.
However, I think that Garfield beat you to this insight some 25 years ago.
You might want to peruse his articles posted at the following URLs:

http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v5p695y1981-82.pdf

http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v10p113y1987.pdf

In these he states that the word "review" is one of the more ambiguous
terms in science and cites research classifying review journals into eight
different types.  Mark Twain once quipped that the trouble with the
ancients is that they stole our best ideas.

SB



David Goodman <dgoodman at Princeton.EDU>@LISTSERV.UTK.EDU> on 03/07/2006
07:54:21 PM

Please respond to dgoodman at Princeton.EDU

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To:    SIGMETRICS at LISTSERV.UTK.EDU
cc:     (bcc: Stephen J Bensman/notsjb/LSU)

Subject:    Re: [SIGMETRICS] Johan Bollen, Marko A. Rodriguez, and Herbert
       Van de Sompel "Journal Status" arXiv:cs.GL/0601030 v1 9 Jan 2006


The distinction between review journals and primary journals
has long been oversimplified.

Some journals, even the best,  have a mixture of both,
such as Nature, or Science, or cerrtain biology.
Some BMC titles fall into this cateogry as well,  and for them,
only the primary content is OA.

Many primary  journals place  one review article
in the front of each issue.  This is sometimes written by invitation
by a scientist of  greater repute than their usual authors.It serves
the purpose of attracting readers; it also serves the purpose of
 inflating the impact factor.

Unlike purely review journals, these titles can not be
derived from JCR formal criteria, such as the small number
and great length of the articles.

Many A&I services class any article with more than
a cerrtain number of references as a review article, because such an
 article is usually comprehensive enough to serve the purposes of
a review.

I thus think the formal distinction unspecific, whether between journals or
between
individual articles, yet I recognize the need of it, and have nothing
better to offer.
Still, like all publication data, it should be used with the awareness of
the ambiguities. Unfortunately, though a author may use it properly, the
reader
may not fully understand, and one cannot insert a caution of this length
whenever the
word is mentioned.

What one can easily do  is to link to the help pages from ISI:
 about review articles:
http://jcr01.isiknowledge.com/JCR/help/h_sourcedata.htm#review_articles
about review journals:
http://jcr01.isiknowledge.com/JCR/help/h_using.htm  (section on
"Impact factor by article type.")

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
and formerly
Princeton University Library

dgoodman at liu.edu
dgoodman at princeton.edu

>
> Dear Stephen,
>
> Journals are different in size, prestige, etc., but they are also
> differently positioned in networks which differ in terms of the
> densities of
> the graphs. You are mainly interested in stratification within one
> graph/discipline, that is, chemistry. For example, you are
> interested in the
> differences between review journals and article journals