A Digest of Google Scholar journal metrics: Comparison with impact factor and SCImago journal rank indicator for nuclear medicine journals

A DIGEST OF

Zarifmahmoudi, L., Jamali, J., & Sadeghi, R. (2015). Google Scholar journal metrics: Comparison with impact factor and SCImago journal rank indicator for nuclear medicine journals. Iranian Journal of Nuclear Medicine, 23(1), 8-14.

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INTRODUCTION

In the current study, we compared h5-index provided by Google Scholar (GS), impact factor (IF) provided by web of sciences (WOS), and SCImago journal rank indicator (SJR) provided by SCOPUS for quality assessment of nuclear medicine journals.

METHODS

2013 h5-index, 2012 IF, and 2011 SJR of nuclear medicine journals were extracted from their publishers namely GS, WOS, and SCOPUS. Rank of each journal according to each index was provided. Spearman correlation was used for evaluation of the correlation between metrics.

RESULTS

• Overall 22 journals were identified. 
• Spearman correlation coefficients between h5-index and other journal metrics were 0.907 for 2012 IF, 0.979 for 2011 JCR, and 0.978 for 2011 SCOPUS h-index (all p-values<0.00001). 
• Wilcoxon signed ranks test showed no statistically meaningful difference between rankings according to h5-index and other journal metrics (p values of 0.589, 0.565, and 0.542 for 2012 IF, 2011 SJR, and 2011 SCOPUS h-index respectively)

CONCLUSIONS

Our results showed very high correlation between h5-index and other metrics

(all above 0.9). This strong correlation is quite remarkable if we take into account the source of the metrics and the way they are calculated.  In addition to high correlation between different metrics, the ranks of journals according to each source were quite similar again and no statistically meaningful difference was noticed between rankings.

Overall it seems that the new GS journal metrics (h5-index, and h5-median) are reliable and can be used as an alternative to IF or SJR 

Confirms the results found in

Delgado López-Cózar, E.; Cabezas Clavijo, A. (2013). Ranking journals: could Google Scholar Metrics be an alternative to Journal Citation Reports and Scimago Journal Rank? Learned  Publishing, 26 (2): 101-113. 

Delgado-López-Cózar, E &Repiso-Caballero, R., (2013). The Impact of Scientific Journals of Communication: Comparing Google Scholar Metrics, Web of Science and Scopus. Comunicar, 21(41), 45-52.

Cabezas-Clavijo, A., & Delgado-López-Cózar, E. (2013). Google Scholar and the h-index in biomedicine: The popularization of bibliometric assessment. Medicina Intensiva (English Edition), 37(5), 343-354.

Delgado López-Cózar, E.; Orduña Malea, E.; Marcos Cartagena, D.; Jiménez Contreras, E.; Ruiz Pérez, R. (2012). JOURNAL SCHOLAR: Una alternativa internacional, gratuita y de libre acceso para medir el impacto de las revistas de Arte, Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales. EC3 Working Papers 5: 12 de mayo de 2012.