Giuseppe Vizzari

Giuseppe Vizzari

Associate professor at University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy

The strange case of the emerging dead journal

2 minute read

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If you have already read some of the posts in this blog you know my position on bibliometric forms of research evaluation. I promise this time I will be brief, but it’s a tasty bit, from my point of view.

Well, let’s start by a shameless plug on a past paper of mine that happens to appear in the inaugural issue of an open access journal for which I was a member of the editorial board. In retrospect, it was not necessarily a wise choice of venue for the paper: in Italy we now look at the quartile in a given subject area and category in which the journal is situated that year to determine the value of the published papers, so my paper was almost worthless from this perspective. On the other hand, the fact that it was open access made it easily accessible, so it attracted a good number of citations.

However, the journal was not very successful in attracting submissions (typical catch 22: it was not indexed so it did not attract many submissions, and it needed more published papers to be indexed), and it finally SpringerOpen decided to cease publishing it in late 2020.

The interesting thing is that for Scimago in 2023 it is (for the first time) a Q1 journal in one category for Computer Science and two categories in Mathematics!

A rare picture of Scimago and a friend keeping up a dead journal well high in the most appropriate quartile

Well, I can totally understand that an automatic process based on a simple ratio is prone to inertia, noise, potential manipulations, but we are talking about being in Q1 in three categories, not one, while last year it was in Q2 again for the same categories. The journal never made it to Q2 while it was being published, now it’s dead and emerging.

What is worse is again the overall system around this episode: I was looking at journals in Q1 and/or Q2 in specific categories of the Computer Science area, when I spotted this journal very high in the list. The simple fact that I was not looking at the journals most suited to my research but to those that are the best compromise between being right for my work and considered good enough from the research evaluation perspective is a rather depressing consideration on my own behavior.

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The irresistible growth of bureaucracy

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More tips to enlarge your H-index

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In an earlier post I started talking about bibliometrics, some of its flaws, and what I think has become one of the facets of an ideology, something Jerry Z. Muller called “The tyranny of metrics”. I’m going to add two ways to enlarge your H-index that, at the same time, also represent a totally legitimate action in the overall context of a line research.