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This paper investigates different uses of the Journal Impact Factor in national journal rankings and discusses the merits of supplementing metrics with expert assessment. Our focus is national journal rankings, where a cross-country comparison is used as evidence to support decisions about the distribution of institutional funding or career advancement. The seven countries under comparison are: China, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Norway, Poland, and Turkey—and the region of Flanders in Belgium. With the exception of Italy, top-tier journals used in national rankings include those classified at the highest level, or according to tier, or points implemented. A total of 3,565 (75.8%) out of 4,701 unique top-tier journals were identified as having a Journal Impact Factor, with 55.7% belonging to the first Journal Impact Factor quartile. Journal rankings in China, Flanders, Poland, and Turkey classify journals with a Journal Impact Factor as being top-tier, but only when they are in the first quartile of the Average Journal Impact Factor Percentile (AJIFP). Journal rankings that result from expert assessment in Denmark, Finland, and Norway regularly classify journals as top-tier outside the first quartile, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. We conclude that experts, when tasked with metric-informed journal rankings, take into account quality dimensions that are not covered by Journal Impact Factors.

Publication speed is one of the important aspects of scholarly communication since various research performance evaluation systems are based mostly on published papers. This study aims to reveal the factors affecting the publication speed of journals. In this context, six information science journals: ASLIB Journal of Information Management, Journal of Documentation, Journal of Informetrics, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Online Information Review, and Scientometrics are analysed in terms of time to publication (from submission to decision). Our results show that publication time is significantly shorter when an editorial board member or a productive author of a given journal is one of the authors, in compare with the articles. submitted by other authors. The number of authors has a time-prolonging effect on publication time, as expected. On the other hand, publications with more citations were accepted in a shorter time. The papers with authors from central countries and high-income countries have an advantage of shorter publication time. Thus, this study shows that researchers who publish papers with popular and successful researchers from central countries have the advantage of the speed of publication which may have substantial effects on the future academic work, especially of early career researchers.

Günümüzde araştırma performans değerlendirmeleri sıklıkla sayısal kriterlere dayanmaktadır. Ancak bu sayısal kriterler belirlenirken disiplinler ve bu disiplinlerin alt alanlarının özellikleri sıklıkla gözden kaçırılmaktadır. Tüm araştırmacıların/araştırma alanlarının eşit olduğu varsayımını da beraberinde getiren bu yaklaşım aynı disiplin içinde sayısal olarak avantajlı veya dezavantajlı araştırma alanları yaratmaktadır. Bu çalışmanın temel amacı, Türkiye'de yürütülen kütüphanecilik ve bilgibilim araştırmalarının alt konu kategorilerini iki köklü kütüphanecilik dergisinde (Türk Kütüphaneciliği ve Bilgi Dünyası) yayımlanmış makalelere ilişkin veriler kullanılarak sosyal ağ analizi yöntemiyle belirlemek ve her bir alt alanın özelliklerini ortaya çıkarmaktır . Bu amaçla 520 araştırma makalesi ile bu makalelerin atıf yaptığı 16.750 kaynak detaylı olarak incelenmiştir. Sosyal ağ analizini gerçekleştirmek üzere görselleştirme aracı olarak VOSviewer, istatistik yazılımı olarak ise R Commander programından yararlanılmıştır. Araştırmanın bulgularına göre, Türkçe kütüphanecilik ve bilgibilim literatüründe dünya literatürüne paralel olarak dokuz farklı alt konuda araştırmalar yürütülmektedir. Alt konu kategorisi ile yayın için seçilen dergi arasında anlamlı bir ilişki bulunmaktadır. Bunun yanında yayın yapılan alt konu kategorisi ile yayının aldığı atıf sayısı arasında da ilişki saptanmıştır. Son olarak, alt konu kategorilerine göre atıf yapılan kaynak türlerinin farklılık gösterdiği anlaşılmıştır. Bu çalışmadan elde edilen sonuçlar yalnızca araştırma performans değerlendirmelerini iyileştirmeye yönelik olarak değil, kütüphanecilik ve bilgibilim alanında hizmet tasarlama aşamasında da kaynak olarak kullanılabilir.

The social sciences, as a collection of scholarly fields, have quite different characteristics compared to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and medicine) fields. Still, researchers in the social sciences have been evaluated similarly to researchers in STEM for many years. However, many studies have been published regarding the need to evaluate social sciences differently. This chapter examines research evaluation studies published in social sciences and presents the advantages and disadvantages of current research evaluation topics including altmetrics, content-based citation analysis, peer-review, and scientific visualization

One of the most fundamental issues in academia today is understanding the differences between legitimate and predatory publishing. While decision-makers and managers consider journals indexed in popular citation indexes such as Web of Science or Scopus as legitimate, they use two blacklists (Beall’s and Cabell’s), one of which has not been updated for a few years, to identify predatory journals. The main aim of our study is to reveal the contribution of the journals accepted as legitimate by the authorities to the visibility of blacklisted journals. For this purpose, 65 blacklisted journals in social sciences and 2,338 Web-of-Science-indexed journals that cited these blacklisted journals were examined in-depth in terms of index coverages, subject categories, impact factors and self-citation patterns. We have analysed 3,234 unique cited papers from blacklisted journals and 5,964 unique citing papers (6,750 citations of cited papers) from Web of Science journals. We found that 13% of the blacklisted papers were cited by WoS journals and 37% of the citations were from impact-factor journals. As a result, although the impact factor is used by decision-makers to determine the levels of the journals, it has been revealed that there is no significant relationship between the impact factor and the number of citations to blacklisted journals. On the other hand, country and author self-citation practices of the journals should be considered. All the findings of this study underline the importance of the second part of this study, which will examine the contents of citations to articles published in predatory journals because understanding the motivations of the authors who cited blacklisted journals is important to correctly understand the citation patterns between impact-factor and blacklisted journals.

Since COVID-19 first appeared, enormous numbers of scientific articles have been published on this subject every day, and these articles have been brought to the attention of millions of people. People make great efforts to obtain information about COVID-19, however, the public cannot access health information under equal conditions. On the other hand, one of the important missions of science is informing the public, and language is one of the essential channels of this mission. The main aim of this commentary is to analyse the languages of the published articles on COVID-19 to reveal the language trends. To achieve this aim, we evaluated 10,728 publications listed in WHO’s Global COVID-19 database. As a result, although 125 different countries publish articles on COVID-19, our findings show that English, as the universal language of science, is dominant. Scientists prefer the English language for their articles; in fact, this preference is the expected choice because of the international effect of the virus and reaching the whole world. However, all these English-language papers serve the inbound mission of science communication. It is important to convey the results of the research to the public, and in this study, the general features of the non-English journals are determined, and various suggestions are presented in order to make science communication more effective.

This study explores the collaborative nature and interdisciplinarity of the origin(s) of life (OoL) research community. Although OoL research is one of the oldest topics in philosophy, religion, and science; to date there has been no review of the field utilizing bibliometric measures. A dataset of 5647 publications that are tagged as OoL, astrobiology, exobiology, and prebiotic chemistry is analyzed. The most prolific authors (Raulin, Ehrenfreund, McKay, Cleaves, Cockell, Lazcano, etc.), most cited scholars and their articles (Miller 1953, Gilbert 1986, Chyba & Sagan 1992, Wȁchtershȁuser 1988, etc.), and popular journals (Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres and Astrobiology) for OoL research are identified. Moreover, interdisciplinary research conducted through research networks, institutions (NASA, Caltech, University of Arizona, University of Washington, CNRS, etc.), and keywords & concepts (astrobiology, life, Mars, amino acid, prebiotic chemistry, evolution, RNA) are explored.

This paper addresses the question of whether the Marmara Earthquake of August 17, 1999 has had an impact on the contribution of Turkish scholars to the earthquake literature. We identified a total of 1,098 papers published between 1990 and 2009 by Turkish earthquake scientists. These papers were cited 7,691 times. Both the number of papers and the citations they generated have increased considerably after the Marmara Earthquake. This may be explained, in part, by the increase in the number of projects being carried out since then to study the Marmara Sea basin. Earthquake of August 17, 1999 was one of the most destructive earthquakes in recent history. It measured 7.4 on the Richter scale and affected mainly the urban dwellers living in Istanbul and its environs (Ozerdem, 1999). According to the initial reports, the earthquake resulted in approximately 15,226 fatalities and 23,983 injured. In addition to mortalities and injuries, it caused US $9-13 billion property damage. It was estimated that 14,444,298 inhabitants living in the Marmara region were affected by the event. The Marmara Earthquake have had negative effects on the Turkish industry, education and health system, labor force, agriculture and infrastructure (T.R. Prime Ministry State Planning Organization, 1999). This paper reviews the effects of the Marmara Earthquake on the number of publications authored by Turkish scholars. It identifies the most productive authors and institutions carrying out earthquake research in Turkey.