Institute for Scientific Information-indexed biomedical journals of Saudi Arabia

Discussion

Bibliometric analysis of the publications and journals is being increasingly used to measure the quality and quantity of publications in a specific area, country, or region including the Arab world.11-17 Before the introduction of the JIF, the quality of the journal was gauged arbitrarily, based on the parameters like how long it was established, reputation of that journal, the strictness of the peer review, and the acceptance rate. With the assignment of a numerical value to represent the quality of a journal, fierce competition among the journals has been witnessed. In the exact words of Smith (2006), “Now editors break open bottles of champagne if their impact factor rises by a tenth of a decimal point or burst into tears if it falls. They build their editorial strategies around increasing their impact factors. Authors, meanwhile, can quote the impact factors of the major journals and use them when deciding where to submit their papers.”18

There are many concerns raised regarding the usage of the JIF.19,20 These are mainly related to the evaluation of individual publications as surrogate markers for their quality. Such usage was never intended. Garfield, the person who coined the JIF himself has warned against employing the impact factor for the evaluation of individual articles and scientists.4 It is meant to be the measure of journal performance. This is exactly how it has been employed in this study.

Lately, many reports have been published, which have analysed the trends of bibliometric parameters including JIF over a certain period of time. These include time-dependent changes in trends of the journals belonging to certain fields or countries.21-23 These types of studies provide a bird’s eye view of biomedical research and document performance of scientific journals in a particular region or category.24 This study has critically analysed the performance of biomedical journals published from KSA using bibliometric parameters. It explores the bibliographical trajectory of Saudi journals indexed with ISI Web of Science.

This study looked mainly at 3 parameters as surrogate of time-dependent performance of Saudi journals, namely, JIF, ranking of the journals in their respective category, and ES. The findings of this study evidently show that the Saudi biomedical journals are consistently improving their quality in terms of JIF and ES. However, the outstanding growth in the JIF and ES was noted for 2 journals; Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Neurosciences. The performance of the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences was exceptional in the sense that It was first assigned an IF in 2010, when it ranked 250 out of 252 journals in the category of pharmacy and pharmacology. Remarkably, this journal ranked 194 out of 255 journals in the year 2014. This may be due to the fact that this journal is the official organ of the one of the most active scientific societies of KSA namely, Saudi Pharmaceutical Society, and many Saudi researchers in pharmaceutical sciences have opted to publish in this journal.17

The ranking of the 2 medical journals; Saudi Medical Journal and Annals of Saudi Medicine was impossible to evaluate since the number of journals in their category was highly variable over the study years. To control for this variability, a new parameter was created based on the difference between the IF of the journal in question and the mean of the rest of the journals in that category “Medicine, General, and Internal”, as previously mentioned. This analysis revealed that the difference between the JIF of Saudi medical journals and the mean of all the remaining journals decreased significantly until 2012, thereafter, this statistically significant difference disappeared in the last 2 years. One plausible interpretation of this finding is that although the IF of the 2 medical journals has increased compared with baseline year 2007, other journals in the same category have also increased their IF correspondingly; hence, no improvement in the ranking was observed.

Despite the strength of the JIF, several limitations of this measure must be taken into account. One argument against the use of JIF as a measure of quality is the variability of JIF according to the speciality. This anomaly was taken care of in this study by comparing the JIF of each journal with itself and the contemporary journals in the same category. Effectively, each journal served as its own control over the last 8 years. Another concern raised is inflation of JIF by encouraging authors to self-cite.25 Therefore, in addition to JIF, we also analyzed the ES to circumvent this anomaly. Analysis of the performance of the Saudi journals using ES as a parameter revealed some interesting data. All journals showed remarkable growth except the Saudi Medical Journal and the Saudi Journal of Gastroenterology. We have the data of Saudi Journal of Gastroenterology for only 2 years and essentially, there was no difference of the ES over the 2 years. However, the ES of the Saudi Medical Journal consistently continued to decrease from the year 2007 until 2014 despite the increase in the JIF (compare Figure 1A with 3A). This finding reinforces the notion that JIF alone is not a suitable measure to gauge the quality of a journal. It needs to be combined with more robust measure like the ES.

Although the results of the present study show that there is an improvement in the JIF, ranking and ES of Saudi biomedical journals over the course of the last 8 years, this change is slow and somewhat inconsistent. The implication of this study is that the data generated will serve as a baseline for future studies evaluation of the performance of Saudi journals in the coming years, and compare them with other regional and international journals. In order to raise the standards of Saudi biomedical journals, a proactive role of the editors is of paramount importance. The journal impact factor is calculated from the equation that defines JIF as the number of citations received by a journal in a particular year for articles published during the last 2 years divided by the number of “citable” articles published by the journal during the same 2 years.26 The strategies formulated by the editors mainly take advantage of these determinants by either increasing the nominator or decreasing the denominator of the formula as reviewed by Falagas and Alexiou.27 Another study28 showed the unique and innovative measures taken by the top medical journal editors for raising the IF of their journals. This included personal approaches to productive and potentially citable research groups for submissions, improving services for authors and media publicity.28 The impact of media coverage on the number of citation and hence, the JIF was also reported by Phillips et al.29

As with other bibliometric studies, this study also has some inherent limitations. The foremost is the inclusion of those Saudi journals, which are indexed in the ISI Web of Science and whose JCR is available. There are other several journals published from KSA, which are neither indexed in Medline nor ISI. Since the main objective of the study was to document the JIF and ES as surrogate markers for quality of Saudi journals over time, this was not possible for journals having no bibliometric data. Another limitation is that the reasons underlying the observed changes in the JIF over the study period have not been analysed. It might have been due to changes in the citations or changes in the publication output, which are the main determinants of a JIF. Alternatively, there might have been the changes in the publication of review articles, which have the potential to be highly cited, and thus, increase the JIF drastically.30

In conclusion, this study shows that the overall quality of many Saudi biomedical journals has improved in the last 8 years, and the highest improvement in the IF and ES was observed for the Saudi Pharmaceutical Journal and Neurosciences.