Citation rates, knowledge export and international visibility of dermatology journals listed and not listed in the Journal Citation Reports

Publication and citation data for the thirty journals listed in the Dermato logy gr Venereal Diseases category of the 1996 edition of the Journal Citat ion Reports (JCR) on CDROM and seven dermatology journals not listed in the JCR-1996 were retrieved online from DIMDI and analysed with respect to sho rt- and long-term impact factors, ratios of cited to uncited papers, as wel l as knowledge export and international visibility. The short-term impact factors (calculated according to the rules applied in the JCR) are very similiar to their JCR counterparts: thus there are only minor changes in the rankings according to JCR impact factors and those cal culated on the basis of online data, The non-JCR journals rank within the u pper (two titles) and the lower third of the 37 journals (one title being a t the upper end of the last third and the other four titles being at the ve ry end of the list). Ranking the journals according to their long-term impa ct factors results in no major changes of a journal's position. Normalized mean citation rates which give a more direct impression of a journals's cit edness in relation to the average citedness of its subfield are also shown. Ratios of cited to uncited papers parallel in general the impact factors, i .e., journals with higher (constructed) impact factors have a higher percen tage of cited papers. For each journal, the Gini concentration coefficient was calculated as a measure of unevenness of the citation distribution. In general, journals with higher (constructed) impact factors have higher Gini coefficients, i.e., the higher the impact factors the more uneven the cita tion distribution. Knowledge export and international visibility were measured by determinatio n of the distinct categories to which the citing journals have been assigne d ("citing subfields") and of the distinct countries to which the citing au thors belong ("citing countries"), respectively. Each journal exhibits a ch aracteristic profile of citing subfields and citing countries, Normalized r ankings based on knowledge export and international visibility (relating th e number of published papers to the number of distinct subfields and distin ct countries) are to a large extent different compared to the impact factor rankings. It is concluded that the additional data given, especially the d ata on knowledge export and international visibility, are necessary ingredi ents of a comprehensive description of a journal's significance and its pos ition within its subject category.