Journal Citation Reports

Community and Forum → Other questions. Insects topics → Journal Citation Reports

Coelioxys, 01.07.2020 4:19

New data from the Journal Citation Reports has been released. Among other changes in quartiles in various journals, including entomological ones, there is another very unpleasant news. Zootaxa, among 32 other journals, was excluded from Journal Citation Reports due to excessive self-citation, so it will not be assigned an impact and quartile for 2019. Given that this is the most popular journal among taxonomists, including Russian ones, and quartiles are now the main measure of success (at least in the Russian Academy of Sciences and universities), many colleagues are waiting for serious problems with reporting.
Zootaxa editors are discussing a variety of ways to influence the situation, from writing collective letters, to a moratorium on descriptions of new taxa in the journal for the rest of the year. But this is unlikely to change the situation.
To return to WoS in 2021, the journal will most likely have to significantly change its publication policy. Whether they will do so will probably depend on the opinion of the authors and editors.

Comments

06.07.2020 9:41, Coelioxys

Nothing personal, just business. The system is American and all these impacts and quartiles are ultimately tied to money. Now there are offices that will quote your work for money or, on the contrary, will pay you to quote the list you need. Many journals artificially increase their impact by quoting works from their own journal in the same journal. The ISI algorithm calculates such things easily. Another thing is that in the case of Zootaxa, this is not done artificially, but out of necessity, since the bulk of taxonomists are published there, which is why there are so many "self-citations".
Now the editors of Zootaxa are engaged in a dialogue with Clarivate, the essence of which boils down to proving this "non-artistic" self-citation. This is not an easy task, because Clativate will either have to change the calculation algorithm, and they are unlikely to do this, or make an exception for Zootaxa, which is also probably not very desirable, because in this case, an unnecessary precedent will be created.