Publikation
Open Journal Citation Ranking
Akshaya Dharmaraj
Mastersthesis, Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität Kaiserslautern–Landau, 5/2023.
Zusammenfassung
Considering the vast number of papers published daily and the shortcomings of ‘subjective’ methods, such as peer review, citation analysis presents an ‘objective’ alternative for research evaluation. When analysing citation data, a crucial aspect to consider is the selection of appropriate data sources. A detailed study of citation data sources and various methods of data extraction is presented. Until recently, many of the commonly used citation databases were proprietary. However, the emergence of new open data sources is transforming the research landscape. Moreover, the studies conducted on some of the more recently established data sources, such as Semantic Scholar and Open Alex, are comparatively few in number.
While a variety of tools are available for extracting data from citation databases, a majority of these tools lack the ability to extract data from multiple databases. As a solution to this problem, we propose the tool “CitaTrack”, which provides a uniform interface for extracting and aggregating citation data from multiple databases. To create this tool, five different data sources were utilised, including recently established ones, such as Open Alex and Semantic Scholar, along with Crossref, Open Citations Corpus, and Scopus. The sources were selected based on their
multidisciplinary nature, as this enables the extraction of citation data across a wide range of research fields and topics.
An analysis was conducted to rank 20 journals in the field of economics using the Stigler model based on the citation data extracted using the tool. This serves as an illustration of the potential application of the tool in the field of bibliometrics. There is a general consensus regarding the top 5 journals in the field of economics, and this consensus was used as a benchmark to assess and compare the obtained rankings. The rankings were mostly in agreement with the consensus. The ranking generated by Scopus listed all of the top journals among the top 5, while the rankings from the other data sources had four out of the top 5 journals ranked in the top 4 positions.