Diffusion of medical journals analysed through citations
Abstract
Impact Factor (IF) is a popular bibliometircs and scientometrics tool for assessing the
performance of scholarly journals. But there are many national journals from developing and
under developing countries which are not indexed by SCI and are without IF. National journals
play a vital role for a country. It is suggested that the performance of a journal cannot be
measured by a single indicator. Diffusion of information is a basic notion of publications and
citations. So diffusion study has been used to measure the influence of a journal. In this study
two Indian non-SCI medical journals, viz., Indian Journal of Cancer and Journal of Communicable
Diseases were selected for diffusion measure. New JDF and equivalent IF is calculated using
citations data. Data is collected from Elsevier’s SCOPUS database for the period of 2001-
2010. It is found that there is improvement in Diffusion factors for both journals, but there
is significant rise for Indian Journal of Cancer.As Journal of Communicable Disease is cited by
more number of countries than Indian Journal of Cancer, so the former is more international
in nature. Generally they have published papers mostly from India, but number of foreign
authored papers has been increased in IJC. Open access of IJC may be one of the factors for
better performance.
Keyword(s)
Citing journals; Citing countries
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