Impact and prestige indicators of SciELO network health sciences journals: comparative study

Abstract

Background: The use of bibliometric indicators to measure the quality of scientific journals is a general practice in all areas of science. The WoS and Scopus databases continue to be the reference sources to obtain bibliographic indicators. Others such as SciELO network offer indicators about Ibero-American science, which are scarcely collected in WoS and Scopus. The aim of this work was to analyze the association of the indicators proposed by SciELO for health sciences journals, with the most widely used impact and indicators and to study the complementarity of the existing prestige indicators. Methods: Analytical correlational study between SciELO indicators, with impact and prestige indicators from Journal Citation Report, Scopus and Web of Science. The results refer to 2018, the most recent and complete data available. Association between the qualitative variables was analyzed using the chi-square test, and the analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed for the quantitative variables using the Tukey method as a post hoc test. To obtain the relationship between quantitative variables, Pearson’s correlation coefficient was used and Spearman’s coefficient for ordinal variables. The level of significance used in all the hypothesis tests was α≤0.05. Results: The SciELO Impact Factor showed a weak correlation both, with Journal Citation Report (R=0.36; p=0.003), and Scopus Cite Score (R=0.39; p=0.001). The association between the H index of the Web of Science andthe H index of Scopus with the H index of SciELO was weak in both cases (R=0.45; p<0.001 and R=0.340; p=0.003). Conclusions: Indicators proposed by SciELO, for health journals, did not show an association with those of WoS or Scopus. The weak correlation between Impact Factor and Cite Score with SciELO Impact Factor, converts the latter into a necessary “metrics” to assess journals excluded from the “mainstream” and fundamentally those from the Latin American region. The need of using the prestige indicators to fill in the impact indicators, has not been proven in this study.