Evaluation and comparison of influence in international Open Access journals between China and USA

Research on the relationships between discourse leading indicators and citations: perspectives from altmetrics indicators of international multidisciplinary academic journals

Purpose

This paper aims to analyze the relationships between discourse leading indicators and citations from perspectives of integrating altmetrics indicators and tries to provide references for comprehending the quantitative indicators of scientific communication in the era of open science, constructing the evaluation indicator system of the discourse leading for academic journals and then improving the discourse leading of academic journals.

Design/methodology/approach

Based on the theory of communication and the new pattern of scientific communication, this paper explores the formation process of academic journals' discourse leading. This paper obtains 874,119 citations and 6,378,843 altmetrics indicators data from 65 international multidisciplinary academic journals. The relationships between indicators of discourse leading (altmetrics) and citations are studied by using descriptive statistical analysis, correlation analysis, principal component analysis, negative binomial regression analysis and marginal effects analysis. Meanwhile, the connotation and essential characteristics of the indicators, the strength and influence of the relationships are further analyzed and explored. It is proposed that academic journals' discourse leading is composed of news discourse leading, social media discourse leading, peer review discourse leading, encyclopedic discourse leading, video discourse leading and policy discourse leading.

Findings

It is discovered that the 15 altmetrics indicators data have a low degree of centralization to the center and a high degree of polarization dispersion overall; their distribution patterns do not follow the normal distributions, and their distributions have the characteristics of long-tailed right-peaked curves. Overall, 15 indicators show positive correlations and wide gaps exist in the number of mentions and coverage. The academic journals' discourse leading significantly affects total cites. When altmetrics indicators of international mainstream academic and social media platforms are used to explore the connotation and characteristics of academic journals' discourse leading, the influence or contribution of social media discourse, news discourse, video discourse, policy discourse, peer review discourse and encyclopedia discourse on the citations decreases in turn.

Originality/value

This study is innovative from the academic journal level to analyze the deep relationships between altmetrics indicators and citations from the perspective of correlation. First, this paper explores the formation process of academic journals' discourse leading. Second, this paper integrates altmetrics indicators to study the correlation between discourse leading indicators and citations. This study will help to enrich and improve basic theoretical issues and indicators’ composition, provide theoretical support for the construction of the discourse leading evaluation system for academic journals and provide ideas for the evaluation practice activities.

Characteristics analysis and evaluation of discourse leading for academic journals: perspectives from multiple integration of altmetrics indicators and evaluation methods

Purpose

Under the background of open science, this paper integrates altmetrics data and combines multiple evaluation methods to analyze and evaluate the indicators' characteristics of discourse leading for academic journals, which is of great significance to enrich and improve the evaluation theory and indicator system of academic journals.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper obtained 795,631 citations and 10.3 million altmetrics indicators data for 126,424 published papers from 151 medicine, general and internal academic journals. In this paper, descriptive statistical analysis and distribution rules of evaluation indicators are first carried out at the macro level. The distribution characteristics of evaluation indicators under different international collaboration conditions are analyzed at the micro level. Second, according to the characteristics and connotation of the evaluation indicators, the evaluation indicator system is constructed. Third, correlation analysis, factor analysis, entropy weight method and TOPSIS method are adopted to evaluate and analyze the discourse leading in medicine, general and internal academic journals by integrating altmetrics. At the same time, this paper verifies the reliability of the evaluation results.

Findings

Six features of discourse leading integrated with altmetrics indicators are obtained. In the era of open science, online academic exchanges are becoming more and more popular. The evaluation activities based on altmetrics have fine-grained and procedural advantages. It is feasible and necessary to integrate altmetrics indicators and combine the advantages of multiple methods to evaluate the academic journals' discourse leading of which are in a diversified academic ecosystem.

Originality/value

This paper uses descriptive statistical analysis to analyze the distribution characteristics and distribution rules of discourse leading indicators of academic journals and to explore the availability of altmetrics indicators and the effectiveness of constructing an evaluation system. Then, combining the advantages of multiple evaluation methods, The author integrates altmetrics indicators to comprehensively evaluate the discourse leading of academic journals and verify the reliability of the evaluation results. This paper aims to provide references for enriching and improving the evaluation theory and indicator system of academic journals.

Research on the discourse power evaluation of academic journals from the perspective of multiple fusion: Taking Medicine, General and Internal journals as an example

In the open science environment, this article evaluates the discourse power of academic journals from the perspective of multiple integration. It is conducive to scientific research management and provides a reference for enriching and perfecting the evaluation theory and indicators system of academic journals. Based on the theory of evaluation science, discourse power theory and communication theory, first, this article discusses the basic issues of the discourse power evaluation for academic journals. It defines the academic discourse power and the discourse power of academic journals. It is proposed that the discourse power of academic journals is composed of discourse influence and discourse leading. Discourse influence is composed of discourse influence ability and discourse power, and discourse leading is composed of social media discourse, news and policy discourse, encyclopaedia discourse, peer-review discourse and video discourse leading. This article explores the formation process and operation mechanism of the discourse power for academic journals. Then, this article constructs the discourse power evaluation model of academic journals. Second, this article integrates multi-source heterogeneous data, then adopts correlation analysis, integrated factor analysis, entropy weight method, Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method and two-dimensional four-quadrant mapping method to conduct empirical research on the discourse power evaluation of Medicine, General and Internal journals from the perspectives of multi-dimensions, multi-factors, multi-indicators and multi-methods fusion. The results show that the research on the discourse power evaluation for academic journals based on the theory, method and application logic is practical, comprehensive and reliable.