Login

Publications  •  Project Statistics

Glossary  •  Schools  •  Disciplines
People Search: 
   
Title/Abstract Search: 

Dissertation Information for Chunpei He

NAME:
- Chunpei He

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Library and Information Science

SCHOOL:
- Case Western Reserve University (USA) (1986)

ADVISORS:
- Miranda Pao

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- William Goffman
- Sarah Scott Gibson
- Betsy Lozoff

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: DISCIPLINE INFLUENCE SCORE: A METHOD FOR DETERMINING THE CORE JOURNALS OF A DISCIPLINE

Abstract: This dissertation addresses the issue of establishing a core journal list for any discipline by a newly devised quantitative measure, the Discipline Influence Score. This new method could be accomplished in two steps: Step 1 consists of the identification of citation-related journals in a discipline by starting with a small group of "seed" journals on the basis of journal citation communication graph, while step 2 involves the computation of the Discipline Influence Score of the identified citation-related journals based on their relative importance to the discipline studied.

This method was demonstrated by journals in veterinary medicine. Starting with five "seed" journals in veterinary medicine, a total of 146 citation-related journals were identified. This list of 146 journals formed the experimental data base for this research, called the Experiment Journal Set. A set of 74 veterinary journals listed in the Journal Citation Reports was considered the Veterinary Journal Set. The Discipline Influence scores (DIS) were used to express the contribution of each of the 146 journals of the Experiment Journal Set to veterinary medicine. The DIS is the sum of the probabilities that a journal could be cited by each of the journals in the Veterinary Journal Set. The 146 journals were ranked by DIS is descending order of their contribution to veterinary medicine. It was found that this list included journals in veterinary medicine, general medicine, agriculture, and basis science.

Spearman's rank-correlation coefficient was then used to compare the journal rankings based on the DIS and those produced by four other quantitative measures: Productivity, Citations Received, Impact Factor and Influence Measure. Surprisingly the DIS ranked list was not correlated with any of the other lists by any of the four quantitative measures. Yet there was statistically significant correlation between every other pair of the lists by four other measures.

A comparison was also made between the journals ranked by Impact Factor, Influence Measure, and the DIS with an evaluation of journal usage by experts in veterinary medicine. A questionnaire was designed and sent to experts in veterinary institutions in US and China. The questionnaire contained 46 journal titles which were the top 20 ranked journals by each of the three quantitative measures. A statistically significant rank-correlation coefficient (0.868) was found between Impact Factor and Influence Measure, Implying that there two measures are redundant. The rank correlation between DIS and the evaluation by experts was found to be statistically significant (0.741), indicating that both Impact Factor and Influence Measure may describe different properties of a journal as opposed to the DIS, and are completely inappropriate for identifying journal collection specifically oriented to specific disciplines. Journals with high DIS are also favorite choices by professionals in veterinary medicine. Thus they are likely to be good candidates for veterinary medical libraries.

A comparison between the five ranking methods with two core veterinary journal lists was also made. The result of the comparison showed that the DIS produced the best results: all the top 20 journal titles ranked by the DIS are in the core veterinary journal list, while only 9, 10, 10, and 10 journal titles were captured by the top 20 journals by Productivity, Citations Received, Impact Factor, and Influence Measure respectively. A similar result was obtained by comparing the top 40 ranking journals: the DIS captured 38, while the other four measures no more than 20. These results showed that in the journal evaluation for a specific discipline, the DIS is a better method than selection based on Productivity, Citations Received, Impact Factor, and Influence Measure. The DIS mirrored the actual journal use pattern of the professionals in the discipline under study.

The findings suggest that the DIS may be a useful tool for journal selection for a specific discipline.

MPACT Scores for Chunpei He

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-01-31 06:01:27

Advisors and Advisees Graph

generating graph, please reload

Students under Chunpei He

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None