Data Analysis and Applications 2

3 Bibliometric Variables Determining the Quality of a Dentistry Journal

Considering the impact factor by Journal Citation Report as a measurement of the scientific quality of a journal, a logit regression model has been fitted in order to select the most influential bibliometric variables to estimate the aforementioned indicator. In particular, the study has focused on journals belonging to the field of dentistry and the explicative variables are as follows: H index of the journal, H index of the editor-in-chief, percentage of papers whose research has been supported by external institutions as well as other factors related to the contents and framework of the journal. Regarding this criterion, the logit model provides a correct classification rate (CCR) of 83.3% for a cut-point of 0.5.

3.1. Introduction

Over the past decades, several indicators to evaluate the quality of scientific journals have been developed. One of the most common and useful is the impact factor (IF) provided by the Journal Citation Reports (Thomson Reuters), which is a relative quality index obtained by dividing the number of yearly citations received by a journal into the total number of papers published in this journal, both related to the last 2 years. The IF allows for the division of a set of journals from a certain field ordered decreasingly in groups by quantiles such as terciles, quartiles or percentiles.

In order to estimate and forecast the IF several explanatory variables including the H index ...