[Factor impact and indexing in bibliographic databases: comparison of these quality criteria for the assessment of pharmaceutical journals]

Abstract

In spite of limits, the impact factor (IF) of Journal Citation Reports (JCR) of Science Citation Index (SCI) edited by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) is the most currently used bibliometric factor by scientists. Otherwise, bibliographic systems select and index scientific journals with their own quality criterion. In order to bring scientists and information professionals some new journal evaluation developments, we studied and compared pharmaceutical journal IF and the number of bibliographic systems in which they were indexed. We firstly have given our definition of pharmaceutical journal and then evaluated these journals by giving one point each time they were indexed in one of the five following bibliographic systems: Index Medicus/Medline, Excerpta Medica/Embase, International Pharmaceutical Abstracts, Chemical Abstracts, Current Contents. We then compared their results with IF. We selected 292 journals: 14.4% scored 5 points, 22.3% scored 4 points, 27.7% scored 3 points, 18.8% scored 2 points, 16.8% scored 1 point. We also showed that the more journals scored highly, the more they had chances of being taken by JCR. We studied the first hundred journals indexed by JCR and having the highly IF: 31, 40, 21, 6 and 2 journals were respectively indexed by 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 bibliographic systems. We showed that there was a significant difference between the two classifications. So, we can say that people who take IF as the one and only journal quality criterion have in fact a very partial representation of the edition of scientific papers.